Today is the 61st anniversary of the first Declaration of Havana. In response to the US administration’s attempt to isolate Cuba, Fidel Castro delivered a series of speeches designed to radicalise Latin American society. The first was delivered to hundreds of thousands of Cubans in Revolution Square on 2 September 1960.
The Havana Declaration condemns the criminal intervention of US imperialism in the affairs of all Latin American peoples, rejects the attempt to preserve the Monroe Doctrine, and calls for strengthening the solidarity of the Latin American peoples and intensifying the workers’ struggle for their rights.
"The Cuban people have only wanted the decisions guiding their conduct to be theirs, that the flag with the solitary star which flutters over our homeland should be theirs and theirs alone! They wanted their laws to be their own, their natural wealth to be their own, and their democratic and revolutionary institutions to be their own. They wanted their fate to be their own, a fate in which no interest, no oligarchy and no government, however powerful it might be, would have a right to interfere.
"And it must be our freedom, because it has cost us much sacrifice to win it. Sovereignty must be ours and complete, because our people have been fighting for sovereignty for a century. The wealth of our land and the fruits of our labour must be ours, because our people have had to sacrifice much for this and all that has been created has been created by the people, and all there is here of wealth has been produced by our people, through their sweat and their labour."
...."They do not want revolutions in America? Well, they have a revolution here in America! they don’t want justice done in an American country, so that finally our peasants will have land, our children will have schools, our families will have homes, the people will have work, beaches, opportunity, and so that the sons of the peasants and the workers alike can go to the universities? They do not want a happy people? Well, they have a happy people, even if they don’t want it, because no one has made a gift of this happiness to this people.
"This happiness has been won with much sacrifice, and this is a people which has a right to happiness, because it was able to win it, because it is only when there is a revolutionary spirit such as that of the people of Cuba, when there is a people a politically mature and as formidable as ours, that a struggle such as that Cuba is waging can be waged.
"Our people have justly won the respect of the entire world, the admiration of the entire world, the love of the other peoples in the world, because they understand that we are a small people that we have had to overcome very great obstacles."
The full text of the first Declaration of Havana, delivered 60 years ago today can be read here https://bit.ly/3jBSsmZ
Source: Cuba Solidarity
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