Even this I think obscure what actually happened in Cuba. Cuba didn't have people who were down to "back liberation movements" when Fidel Castro started. They built that. When we resign ourselves to what exist today, we surrender ourselves to the fate chosen to us by the capitalists. I don't think this will be easy and have its own exceptional problems here, but I don't think it is impossible.

The following is Fidel Castro in his own words:

How did you put together the group of militants who were going to attack Moncada?

I’d done quite a bit of proselytising and speech-making - because I already had a clear idea of how to make a revolution - and I had the habit of studying each and every combatant who volunteered, determining his motivations and ensuring that he understood the rules of organization and conduct, explaining our goals and principles, explaining what I could and should explain. Without that approach, you couldn’t have conceived the plan for Moncada. On what basis? What forces were you going to have? Who were your combatants, what were their motivations, their backgrounds, and how many of them were there? If you can’t count on the working class, the campesinos, the under-class, the poor and humble, in a country terribly exploited and suffering, then none of it makes any sense. **There was no class consciousness [in Cuba at the time], except for those who were members of the Popular Socialist Party, who were pretty well educated politically; there was, though, what I sometimes called a class instinct. ** here was Mella, a young, brilliant university leader who, along with a fighter from the War of Independence, had founded the Communist Party of Cuba in 1925. I’ve mentioned him more than once. But in 1952 that party was politically isolated - imagine, this was the heyday of McCarthyism and [Cuba was] under the influence of a ferocious imperialist campaign, with all the resources imaginable at its disposal, to be used against anything that smelled the slightest bit like Communism. There was an enormous lack of political culture.

Did it take you long to gather all those men together?

It went relatively quickly. I was amazed at how fast, using the right arguments and a number of examples, you could persuade somebody that that society [we lived in] was absurd and that it had to be changed. Initially, I began the job with a handful of teams. There were a lot of people who were against theft, misappropriation of funds, unemployment, abuse, injustice, but they thought it was all attributable to bad politicians. They couldn’t see that it was the system that created all of that. We know that capitalism’s influences, invisible to the majority of people, act on the individual without the individual’s awareness. Many people were of the opinion that if you brought an archangel down from heaven, the most expert of them all, and gave him the job of governing the Republic, that would bring about administrative honesty - you could create more schools, no one would steal the money to be used for public health and other pressing needs any more. They couldn’t see that unemployment, poverty, the lack of land - all those calamities couldn’t be fixed even by an archangel, because those enormous tracts of land, the latifundios, that system of production would not allow anything, anything at all, to be done. I was totally convinced that the system had to be done away with. The kids I recruited were Orthodoxists, very anti-Batista, very good, honest kids, but they lacked any political education. They had class instinct, I would say, but not class consciousness. As I explained at the beginning, we began to recruit and train men not in order to make a revolution, but rather to engage - this seemed perfectly elementary - in a struggle, along with others, to reestablish the constitutional status quo of 1952, when [the constitutional system] was short-circuited, two months and twenty days before the elections, by Fulgencio Batista, a man who had great influence in his old and unpurified military and who conceived the coup when he became convinced that he had no chance whatever of winning the elections. We organized as a fighting force - not, I repeat, in order to make a revolution but rather to join all the other anti-Batista forces, because after the coup on 10 March 1952, it was elementary that all those forces had to be united. The party that had won the 1948 elections, the Authentic Party, was in power and it was pretty corrupt, but Batista was much worse. There was a constitution, there was a whole electoral process under way, and eighty days before the June elections, on 10 March 1952, Batista launched his coup. The elections were going to be held on 1 June. He was his party’s candidate, but the polls said he had no chance whatsoever of being elected; clearly the party that Chibas had founded, the Orthodox Party, was going to win by a wide majority. So Batista launched his military coup. [And almost immediately,] everybody began to organize and make plans to bring down that illegal, despotic government.

How many men did your group have?

We didn’t have a centavo, we didn’t have anything. What I did have was a relationship with a party, the Orthodox Party, which had a lot of young people in it, all very anti-Batista - they were like the antithesis of Batista. In that respect, there was no other organization comparable to it in the country. The ethical and political stature of the youth wing of the party was very high. I couldn’t say that they had, as I said to you earlier, a high level of political awareness, revolutionary awareness, class consciousness, because when all was said and done, the leadership of that party, like always, except in Havana, where there was a large group of intellectuals and professionals, had gradually fallen into the hands of landowners and other wealthy men. ** But the majority of the party were good men, honest, hard-working people, even some from the middle class - [they weren’t] even particularly anti-imperialistic, because the subject of imperialism was simply not discussed. It was discussed only within the circles of the Communist Party - that was how low the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people had fallen after the Second World War; it had been crushed under the overwhelming weight of the Yankees’ ideological and advertising machinery.**

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Those countries had far more than their fair share of reactionary counterrevolutionaries.