“This pamphlet is a response to the bloody offensive by our tyrant and his master –Yankee capitalist imperialism.”
Julio Antonio Mella’s “The Class War in Cuba” is an elegiac yet electrifying statement on the fight against totalitarianism and imperialism in the Americas. Originally published in August 1926 as a pamphlet titled "El grito de los mártires” [“The Cry of the Martyrs”], it was written during the dictatorship of “the butcher,” General Gerardo Machado y Morales, whose repressive rule over Cuba was unabashedly supported by Wall Street. Mella, a Havana-born student activist and founding member of the Cuban Communist Party, had fled Cuba for Mexico City. There, he found common cause with other anti-imperialists, wrote for radical journals including Cuba Libre, El Libertador, Tren Blindado, El Machete and the Boletín del Torcedo, and plotted Machado’s overthrow.
“The Class War in Cuba” documents a radical moment in Cuba’s early twentieth-century history. It is, in part, a list of proletarian martyrs, of workers, peasants, and labor organized killed in struggle against the Machado’s regime: the anarchist Luis Díaz Blanco, executed by the Cuban police; militant labor leader Enrique Varona, assassinated by Machado’s Guardia Rural; Cuxart Falcón of the Sindicato General de Obreros de la Industria Fabril, who was “shot while trying to escape;” Tomás Grant, leader of the railroad workers of Camaguey, executed under the personal orders of Machado; and of Alfredo Lopez, of the Federation of Labor of Havana, detained, tortured, and murdered in a Havana fortress. Mella’s short obituaries of these figures are both intensely personal portraits and politically powerful statements that remind readers of the righteousness of the struggle against domestic tyranny, bourgeois rule, and imperialist repression.
In this, “The Class War in Cuba” is also significant today. Mella’s essay is a reminder of the long history of radicalism in Cuba that developed against Spanish colonialism and US imperialism, against the brutal rule of Valeriano Weyler and Fulgencio Batista, with Machado in between. It is also a reminder of the terms of that struggle: of class unity at home and abroad against fascism and imperialism wherever it is to be found.
Moreover, Mella’s writing has an added poignancy: on January 10th, 1929, he was assassinated in the streets of Mexico City by an agent of Machado – with US imperialism, casting a shadow over Cuba, behind him.
We reprint Julio Antonio Mella’s “The Class War in Cuba” below.
The Class War in Cuba
Julio Antonio Mella
This pamphlet is a response to the bloody offensive by our tyrant and his master –Yankee capitalist imperialism. It is also a homage to the only revolutionary cadre in Cuba willing to defend freedom at the cost of their own lives. This is a homage to these workers and peasants and to the few students and intellectuals who have dared to face the attacks of the tyrant. This is a memorial to the fallen. Your memory will never be betrayed by us, the living. This is an inspiration to those who struggle, and the revenge of us who are yet to die.
One – another – yet another. There are too many to count. There is nothing left to feel when we hear of more deaths. We are soldiers in battle and know that the list of martyrs will grow daily. We have lost our humanity. Hatred fires our hands–hands longing to be claws; vengeance fills our stares with a mad glow–stares that yearn to be rays of death. All this has killed what humanity might yet live in the oppressed.
We have no homeland. We have only class enemies.
Class war has broken out–brutal, violent, and bloody. Quiet the frightened, screaming mouths! Shame on the weeping cowards! Punish the wretched who refuse to struggle! Praise to the brave standing in the vanguard! No more theoretical discussions and foolish Byzantinism. Let action speak with its unambiguous eloquence!
The heroic past of our class guides and encourages us. The cries of the victims sacrificed in the ditches of the Commune of 1871; the screams of the martyrs of 1905, sacrificed in the snows of Czarist Russia; the worldwide clamor of the rebellion of 1917: this is the music of our proud struggle.
Those who left their workshops only to fall in the jungles during the struggle for independence; those murdered in the first general strike in the republic's early days; those who valiantly succumbed during the proletarian epic of imperialism's rapid and violent industrialization of Cuba: it is they who blazed the trail! Forward!
Díaz Blanco, you irrigated the improvised barricades of Havana with your blood. You fell, shot by our exploited brothers who murder unwittingly in the service of our common masters—the imperialists, the capitalists, and their tyrant. You, proletarian revolutionary, are our herald.
Your blood, flowing through the streets of Havana, has written a message that workers read with emotion as they go to their prisons and when they return home. Its words are: "Justice! Justice! Justice!"
Varona, fellow fighter, who could have prophesied your tragic end? Magnificent leader, a giant in body and mind, you were made for the vanguard of the Proletarian Army. As large as a gladiator, death itself seemed to fear you. Your disturbing words, like the struggle in Cuba's countryside, were prophecy heralding a new era. Your leadership of powerful strikes in the sugar mills gave hope to a proletariat avid for new conquests. Greetings, general of the young, red proletarian armies of Cuba! As the years pass and the proletariat destroys all social tyranny, you will also have been a herald.
You fell victim to a treacherous murder, killed by a servant of the tyrant sent from the Presidential Palace expressly to find you. The ruling of the official tribunals, with a last vestige of integrity, exonerated you of the fantastic accusation of being a terrorist. But who can pardon you after the tyrant's personal "justice"? To him, you merited death; you were an oppressed worker, you struggled against foreign imperialism on behalf of your comrades, and the tyrant could never pardon this crime.
The last cry that escaped your lips when you fell still resounds in the ears of the proletarians of Cuba: "Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!"
Cuxart, unfortunate and obscure worker, you knew nothing of class war.
You knew nothing of the hatred the rich and their lackeys of the tyrannical regime have for us. You were happy “because you fulfilled your duty.” You did your work punctually, and nothing more. … Who would have guessed you would be the object of these criminal sycophants?
Our leader is all-powerful. Our leader is theatrical, like an actor or a tyrant. Our leader safely enjoys his passions. A “conspiracy,” a “crime,” was invented. You, unfortunate worker, became the plaything of this farce. But for the monsters that hatched this nonsense about a supposed assault, there were congratulations in the press, promotions, and other rewards.
While you were prisoner, another of our brothers, a soldier in the service of the tyrant, meted out punishment under the Law on Fugitives. What irony!
Comrade Cuxart! You fell, but the soldier who assassinated you has terrible nightmares. Each night he sees your body appear like a ghost above the memorial wall of La Cabana. He sees your face rise next to the martyrs who fell in the Ditch of the Laurels, defending the independence of Cuba against the tyranny of Old Spain. This ignorant soldier has serious worries. He doesn’t understand why your face is there with the martyrs of the Revolution. He doesn’t know that it is a crime to kill a “worker dog.” But he calls his buddies and tells them his dreams.
(O Cuban soldiers, workers, and peasants, oppressed by the Machado tyranny, when will you learn, like Russians oppressed by Czarist tyranny, that you are a single class, that you are brothers, that you have common bosses, and that the factories, the fields, and the power are yours and yours alone? The workers and peasants create the wealth and you, soldiers, defend the exploiters, the foreign and native bourgeoisies. When will you understand that your parasite officer is a servile tool of the Yankee plantations and railroad bosses, and that together they oppress you, soldiers, and your brothers, the workers and peasants?)
Late at night by the sea, near where the Maine was sunk so that a few brigands could commit the crime of seizing Cuba, soldiers come to listen. They cannot explain the ghosts’ appearance. But from their breasts comes a unanimous shout, and this cry can be heard by the masses of soldiers Revolt! Revolt! Revolt!”
Grant, you came from the homeland of the omnipotent Yankee. But nothing could save you. In that country, as in Cuba and many others, you are not a citizen simply because you were born inside its borders. The only citizens of the United States of America are the rich, who come to Cuba as conquerors, giving order through the ambassador to protect their interests. You were a worker and a fighter, so you did not have your government’s protection. Not at all! It happened after the epic, month-long railroad strike, with its dead, injured, and disappeared. One night, an “unknown person,” as the bourgeois papers say, put the cold barrel of a revolver to your chest. Its bullet ended your life and made you one more martyr to our cause.
North American worker, may your treacherous death at the hands of agents of the imperialist companies – agents who might as easily be soldiers as the companies’ paid guards – awaken the nation of Lincoln. May they learn that the financial oligarchy that rules the world from Wall Street is the worst enemy of the people of the United States.
In any case, the thousands of comrades who filed by your corpse in Camagüey heard a cry of redemption screaming from your bloody wound: "Down with imperialism!"
Lopez, O warrior, I have no words for you. The author of these lines now feels like an orphan. A novice in the struggle, he gained his experience through your example and through your actions.
Oh, your proletarian word, your union work, your organizing skill! The Workers' Federation of Havana, the National Workers' Confederation, the Congresses of Camagüey and Cienfuegos are powerful organs of class struggle. But you, fighter, were their soul. Despite your disappearance, you are still the teacher of the Cuban proletariat.
(Teacher, it is not a tear I offer you as homage, nor is it these lines, which are not literature, but an act of revolution. What I offer you is the solemn promise to follow your path, to continue your work, and to cooperate so that the new proletarian generation to which I belong might move beyond the last in our struggle.)
No one knows your whereabouts. Can we revolutionaries choose how we die? We die as soldiers, wherever our enemy's bullets find us. Were you kidnapped? Are you alive? Then you will return to the struggle with even more enthusiasm. Were you murdered? “The revolutionary has no resting place other than the grave," said Saint-Just more than a century ago.
Teacher, brother, and comrade, the deeds you performed are silent
monuments to your memory. When the hour of our triumph arrives, we, the oppressed class, will have been victorious in large part because of what you began. You will have no avenues named after you in bourgeois cities. nor statues in public parks. But every proletarian will know that the organizations you founded are the best monuments to your memory.
We salute you, fighter! The organizations you left us are our red battalions. Soon they will cry out against the day's tyrants, against imperialism, against native capital and its allies: "To the attack! Attack! Attack!" You, comrades who are still alive (forgive me if I do not name you, in case you have not been struck by the tyrant's glare), persecuted comrades, candidates for sacrifice, as we all are in this struggle, let us say together, in a single shout:
"Forward!"
Julio Antonio Mela, "El grito de los mártires," 1926, in Hombres de la revolución: Julio Antonio Mela (La Habana: Ed. Imprenta Universitaria, 1971), pp.17-24
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