Religion and Revolution in Cuba & Nicaragua
by Blase Bonpane (1983)

Transcribed from tape of speech to a meting at Cal State University, Los Angeles, sponsored by the Venceremos Brigade and the Antonio Maceo Brigade, broadcast  on Pacifica radio station KPFK, Los Angeles. Edited by Walter Lippmann, July 2007. There are two places with gaps on the tape, but it's a terrific commentary which I'm sure you will enjoy thoroughly. In time I hope to get the audio tape posted to the internet as a sound file. Anyway, I'm sure you'll enjoy reading this here.

We've just celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Many of you have been to Siboney, and I think that that experience is something we should think about. Everything was wrong with that attack. Everything was wrong with it. They didn't exactly know where they were going. I think some of them started to get lost on the way into Santiago. There were several young people in cars, very visible, and they actually began to attack a fortress with walls that are extremely thick, as you know. They didn't think that the soldiers would be there, or they thought many of them would be drunk because it was a day of festival.

The point is that it was an attack that would be called naive; it is an attack that would be called poorly planned; it is an attack that was a failure, and in the history of social and political change, it is a day of glory for the Cuban people, and for people interested in liberation all over the world. Because what it proves to us is that perfectionism is not part of the program. We don't wait to do the perfect thing before we do something. Those who are waiting for perfection will live and die without doing anything.

And much of our culture is oriented to being perfect prior to action. And that's the example, I think, of Moncada, that they began. They made an action; it was a military failure, and, it remains as an example of revolutionary courage. Those of you who have visited Moncada have seen the situation there, and what a very bad scene it was from a military standpoint. I was in Colombia last week, and one of the Cubans present said, "We don't necessarily consider the attack on the Moncada barracks as a socialist action. We consider it as an action of a group of young people who were fed up with the misery of their country."

And that marked the beginning of the 26th of July public actions, la clandenistinidad, the example of Frank Pais and others who were involved in the urban, clandestine action especially emanating from Santiago. Perhaps many of you have visited the cemetery there, and have seen the large number of teenagers who are buried there, and who gave their lives in clandestine action in Cuba during those years of struggle. But if this started in [19]53, thirty years ago, we have to consider what was going on at that time. Look at it in the context of history.

[The] United States was very busy in 1953. It was extremely busy in overthrowing the government of Guatemala. It was working very hard to destroy the ten years of spiritual socialism that began with Jose Arévalo, and it was not paying a great deal of attention to Cuba militarily at that moment; while it was of course supporting Batista and supporting the ugliness of the Cuban scene. There was so much about Cuba that was so ugly, as it remained this large brothel for the people from the United States to go for $49.50 by ship to spend a weekend in Havana. So the focus of the United States at the time of Moncada was in the overthrow of Guatemala. And that overthrow was conducted, to our surprise, from Honduras; something so reminiscent of what is going on today. The counterrevolution to destroy Guatemala emanated from Honduras, from the organization in Honduras ultimately bringing in the puppet, Castillo
Armas to take over and to lead to all these years, almost thirty years now, of counterrevolution in Guatemala.

There is a tremendous relationship between the Nicaraguan and the Cuban revolution. And I think it's extremely important to see this. We have, and we remember perhaps, the relationship between the church figures in Nicaragua and the Nicaraguan revolution. I think we may fail to be in touch with the relationship between the progressive church and the Cuban revolution. I would cite one book, and I was going to bring it with me, but that's not important. It's an important book; to see this similarity between the Nicaraguan and the Cuban phenomena, and I would recommend the book Christianity and Revolution, published in 1963. Published by Herder and Herder, and authored by Leslie Dewart, the Canadian theologian.

Because he was making it clear that as the Communists of Cuba railed and gave their tirades against the adventurism of this silly 26th of July movement, and separated themselves from it, and attacked Fidel; while this went on, certain individuals were involved in supporting Fidel who were from a Catholic background. Now some of them behaved very similarly to the high clergy of Nicaragua. One case in particular would be the archbishop of Santiago, [Enrique] Pérez Serantes. The only reason that Fidel and his brother are alive is because of the intervention of the archbishop. This was a class intervention, because Fidel, as most of the revolutionaries of the world emanated from the bourgeois class, [and had a] bourgeois background.

Where do you get an education in the capitalist world unless you're from a bourgeois background? And that is certainly true in the case of Che Guevara, in the case of Fidel Castro, in the case of Lenin, in the case of most of the modern revolutionaries. In order to understand what was going on in the world, they had to have some participation in the bourgeois educational system in order to become conscious and then to get to the level related by Jose Marti, when they get to the point where they can say, "Con los pobres de la tierra que no yo me suerte..." ("I'm going to throw in my luck, my lot, with the poor of the earth") then regardless of where I have come from, then I'm a revolutionary. When that relationship comes between classes, and those who have the privilege of education have used their understanding of economics, of politics, and have literally thrown in their lot with the poor, then you get this chemistry that is known as revolution taking place. Yes, Pérez Serantes saved the life of Fidel and Raul principally because of their class. The others that died in Moncada, nobody much cared. Some of them were murdered after they were captured. The archbishop intervened. He intervened also to help to get them out of prison. He was successful in this. Was he a supporter of the movement? No. Not at all. He was not a supporter of the movement, but someone from the class that he represented was in prison, and he helped to get them out.

There were priests in the lower clergy in Cuba; I would think especially of Padre [Guillermo] Sardiñas. And as we read the daily accounts of the revolutionary war, we see Padre Sardiñas there in a role that we no longer see priests in much, in revolution; he was actually there as chaplain. This is not Padre Gaspar Garcia la Viana of Nicaragua, who was not chaplain. The modern people are not chaplains. Many of them are simply soldiers or comandantes. Sardiñas was there as chaplain, and Fidel, in his recounting of the early days, said, "Yes, it is true that when we went through the campo of the eastern part of Cuba, when we went through the campo, people would frequently say, 'would you baptize our babies?' And he said 'aye'. Fidel was the godfather. He said, 'no era una farsa'. He said this wasn't meant to be some kind of a joke or a farce.

He said, "I did this. I acted as godfather to the babies when Father Sardiñas was baptizing, in order to say that our movement was coming out of the culture of Cuba, out of the religion of Cuba, out of the background of Cuba, and yes, we had our religious symbols; and we refused to ever have any of the anti-religiosity of some of the previous revolutions." He felt, and he had learned much from the Mexican revolution, and perhaps the greatest error, by hindsight, was an attempt to make the church illegal. This in the history of the Mexican revolution of 1910, led to the formation of the Cristero movement, a counterrevolutionary movement which was very much of a Roman Catholic movement, which was a reaction to the concept that the constitution of 1917 would not permit religion or the celebration of religion in any form in Mexico. It was a historical mistake.

You do not attack the culture of a people as you are revolutionizing. You show your respect for the culture, and you enter into the culture, and you help the culture to become available to all, so that we never again refer to the "cultured class", as we used to have an educated class that depended on money, so prior to revolution, we had a cultured class, which meant you had money. Culture with revolution belongs to everybody. There is when you see the explosion of dance, of song, of una mística, the mystique of the movement.

There is no revolution without a mystique. There is no revolution that can't dance. If it can't dance, it is not revolutionary. If it does not have music, it is not revolutionary. If it does not have joy, it is not revolutionary. And so there's a great deal of pseudo-revolution around. There's a great deal of sickness around. There's a great deal of mental illness around that sometimes covers itself as revolution. And you see this sometimes in large groups. I thought maybe it was a phenomenon only visible in the United States, but here last week in Colombia, to see gathered representatives from the whole Central American revolution: Ernesto Cardinal was there, Guillermo Ungo was there, Mendes Arceo was there, the archbishop; and with hundreds and hundreds of people present, there were probably four people in the crowd who represented some kind of self-designed super-left approach, that decided that the four of them were going to teach the Central American revolution that to participate in the Contadora action was counterrevolutionary. So they stood up, and they shouted and screamed and stomped, and gave their demagoguery to the leaders of the revolution. And everybody listened to them, and then they all stomped out.

And then one of the comandantes of the FMLN said, in typical revolutionary fashion, which is an extremely low-key and extremely gentle and extremely understanding approach; he said, "You know, in El Salvador, many of us came from different groups, and all of our groups thought we were the vanguard." And he said, "None of us were the vanguard." He said, "All of us had a little bit of the truth, and when we got to the point that we could work together, then we became, to understand what revolution which is about, what it's about is the art of jelling forces, it's the art of uniting forces; it is not the art of claiming to have the answer. People who have the answer are the problem. And those who have predetermined answers are going to give us a hell of a hard time saying that they are the vanguard. They are not. The vanguard is the people in process, the people themselves of El Salvador; that is the vanguard. It is not an organization. It is not a club. It is not a group from outside of the actual experience. It is the total complexus of all of the people involved in making change, with all of their creativity, with all of their music, with all of their dance, with all of their culture. And we find consistently that counterrevolutionary super-leftists can't laugh and can't dance. And that's one of the signs right there that there's something wrong with them. (Applause)

The history involved here, as you know, there was a period between 1959 and 1961 where Cuba was in search of its political compass. Fidel was back and forth to talk to Eisenhower. His points at the time were to refer to the constitution of 1940; to refer to the importance of bilateral relations with the U.S., sounded so similar to what the Sandinistas are saying today. Putting it in very simple terms. Saying, "Look, if we deal with you economically, it's a simple thing. We don't make John Deere tractors in Cuba, and we would probably really like to have a John Deere dealership there. We need that. Okay. But we don't want to take the whole thing. We don't need Coca-Cola. We can make soft drinks out of fruit juice, which are much better than that belly-wash, so don't give us Coca-Cola. We'll deal with you point by point on what we need.

Of course we want relations with you. Of course we want trade. We don't want any broken relations. But it's got to be bilateral. You have to hear us, and hear our goals and objectives. You can't come in with your Mafia and just stumble all over us and manipulate us as you did in the past." Well, the last thing, as you know, that Eisenhower did was to break relations with Cuba. Shortly thereafter, was in [19]61, where we heard the "I am a Marxist-Leninist and will be to the ultimate days of my life" speech of Fidel. And then came the very careful formation of the party structure, with a few of the old members of the party participating, but most of the new party being re-established from the guerilleros of the 26th of July Movement. And that became the structure of the state.

We see some differences now, and no one is more aware of these than Fidel, with all of his humility, as he came to visit Managua. And he said, "I have not come here to teach you anything. I am here to learn. We started our program some twenty years ago, and you are now at another point in history. So I'm visiting Nicaragua to learn." I take that not as a political statement, but as his actual point of view, as his gut feeling about the situation; that this is not 1959.

And history does not repeat itself. That is one of the fundamental themes of a revolutionary. You don't look at life as a broken record. You don't imitate the Russian revolution. You don't imitate the Cuban revolution. You don't imitate the Chinese revolution. You create the history of Central America looking at the past, observing the past, taking from it what is of value, showing reverence for the past, which includes being willing to change. The religiosity of the Nicaraguan revolution is much more visible than the ultimate religiosity of the Cuban revolution. There are reasons for that.

The Cuban church was an urban church. It was one of the weakest churches in Central and South America, in contrast to the church, say, where it is an enormous power, as in Colombia, where its power is stereotypical power in contrast to the marginality of the church in Cuba. The church was marginal after [19]61, and to my sadness in my first visits to Cuba in the sixties, I was very upset with the reality of the churches as centers for counterrevolutionary organization. I saw it. I went there and met the people in the churches, and the attitude of counterrevolution in the churches was amazing and sad. However, the legal approach to the churches was very open: to teach religion within the churches, freedom of worship, Mass, and the celebration of religion seven days a week for anyone interested; but still, that was the center, because the members of the church were from a bourgeois class. The schools also had a similar history. You had to pay to go those schools. So the Catholic schools were closed, and the churches remained open, and the right to teach all religions remained open. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, as all of you have seen who have been there recently. But the marginality of the church, for some reason, is, I would say, much of it is its own fault.

I have had discussions with Cuban priests, even recently. And my feeling was to say, "Why don't you go and spend a few years in Nicaragua, and maybe you'll have a better understanding of the relationship between the church and revolution." In speaking to an eleven-year-old girl recently in Nicaragua - it was the daughter of Margaret Randall - she spent her first ten years in Cuba and her eleventh year in Nicaragua. And it was very interesting to ask her what were the differences between the two revolutions. She said, "When I came to Nicaragua," she said, "I was afraid of the church because it was so visible." She said, "In Cuba, it was much less visible. It was much less part, much less a part of our lives in Cuba than it is here in Nicaragua." So it was something of a shock to her. But this is a matter of comparing and contrasting.

We asked the Jesuits at the University of Nicaragua, "What if we compare, say, the role of Bishop Pérez Serantes in Santiago, Cuba, with the role of Obando y Bravo in Managua." We said, "Why is it that here you have a bishop that apparently has supported the Sandinistas during the struggle, and now that it's over, is taking a counterrevolutionary position. What is that about?" And I think it was the president of the Jesuit university in Managua, with a very straight face, said, "Look, when the rich were opposed to Somoza, Obando y Bravo and the bishops were opposed to Somoza. Now that the rich are opposed to the Sandinistas, Obando y Bravo is opposed to the Sandinistas." He said, "You know, they're going wherever the wealth is gone." He said, "What can we do?" But the point is, this is not the church.

The church is this amazing complexus of people at the base, represented in Central America today by what had formed since the late sixties, known as the communities: communities of people who gather and make decisions. Communities of people who now have a view of primitive Christianity. They don't see Christianity in the form that it was seen during the days of the Cuban revolution. And it's not an accident that the fact of the triumph of the Cuban revolution was before the second Vatican council. [which] had a big impact on the response of the church. Because the second Vatican council came in the early sixties, after the victory. Naturally it was Pope John the XXIII, that friend of socialism, who insisted that relations never be broken with Fidel Castro from the start, and insisted that a Vatican diplomat be in Havana. And sent Monsignor Zaki there to represent the church. And Cuban representatives always be in the Vatican.

And while the United States has not had the relations with the Vatican, Cuba always has, and has always continued to maintain them. But the theology was different. With the Vatican II, in the early sixties, there was a review of what primitive Christianity was about, and the beginnings of liberation theology reached into Central America, and formed revolutionary Christians who were more capable of participating in the changes that were to take place in Central America. It was there that we saw people realizing that morality had to be collective. That change had to be collective. That the view of love - the love that we see today in a place like Cuba: love can be systematized. You can make a motor out of love. You can make a political system out of love. You can extend love not only personally, but by virtue of what a state stands for. A state that says that medical care is a right is systematizing love. A state that says that education is available to everyone is making a system out of love. It is saying that love is not simply a personal thing, but it can also be a collective thing; and in its highest form, it will be seen in a collectiity of the common good.

Now, when Christians began to understand that, then the prophecy of Che Guevara, which was made not until 1966, prior to his death in [19]67, he said, as everybody was looking for him, Che Guevara said the revolution in this continent will begin when the Christians of the continent unite with us for the final organization of the revolution. Because up to now, Christians have allowed their doctrines to be manipulated by reactionaries. He said, "Don't be afraid to say that you're a Christian. Don't pretend that you're like I, Che Guevara. Don't feel that you have to say to me that because I don't believe in God, you don't believe in God. Don't be ashamed of your Christianity, and I won't be ashamed of my Marxism. Let's work together and we'll get along fine!" And that's what began to happen in Central America. An actual bridge of Christians and Marxists began, not in theory, but in fact. Whereas in the past, the church was trying to prove that we also are interested in social justice.

As this developed, the Christians and the Marxists began to work together in a way that we hadn't seen in Cuba because of the class nature of the Christianity, and because of the fact that much of the organi---(dropout of tape here)

spoke of his early reminiscences, that is, even prior to his Jesuit training, in elementary school. He said, you know, he did acknowledge that the church had been principally for the upper classes in Cuba. But he said, "I remember from my earliest years witnessing the conduct of sisters who took care of the sick, who took care of lepers, and who took care of the terminally ill." He said, "I considered this to be perfect communist conduct." Which is what it was, and which is how he defined it. And he never forgot it, and said that this revolution will never be marked by any form of anti-religiosity in any way. And he spoke about the famous priests that were thrown out of Cuba in the Cavadonga incident: many of the Spanish clergy were ordered out. And of course, he said, "They weren't ordered out because they were priests. They were ordered out because they were couras falangistas. He said, "They happen to be fascist clergy." And then he said, "If they're fascists, we don't want them here whether they're clergy or not. And we're not throwing them out because they're clergy, but because they're counter-revolutionaries and they're doing everything possible to overthrow the revolution."

In the period of [19]59 to [19]61, the Cuban revolution Became clearly Marxist-Leninist ; socialist in its orientation. We have had now, a four years' period of orientation of the Sandinista revolution, having finished four years since the victory of July 19th. We see something that certainly can be categorized -- I think should be categorized -- as democratic socialism. We may see less of the classical Marxist-Leninist tendencies in it. I think however, it is part of the evolution, and we should give it our respect, and say that this is the vanguard of 1983. This is where things are going. There is a difference between Central America and Cuba, and there will be a difference, as you can see, between Grenada and Nicaragua.

We have to look at the exciting creativity of people around the world as to how they make change possible. The change is evaluated by the fruits of that change. When we see the healthy children, and the schools, and the freedom to think, and the freedom for education, we -- as Jesus said, "by their fruits ye shall know them." We don't know the effects of the revolution by talk, but by its fruits; and anyone who's seen the beautiful children of Cuba would say, "Hey, you've done it. You've put it together." And the same thing is true as you travel through Nicaragua now, under attack, from the north, the south, the east, and the west. As you see Grenada, you'll see its unique place there -- trying to put in a place where jet planes can land for the first time. And the president almost sounds like Captain Queeg. Have you heard him speaking about Grenada? Listen carefully, and the last time he spoke about it, he said quote, he said, "They're not just growing nutmeg down there." He really sounded like he was cracking up. Just absolutely cracking up. But there it is, you know. They're not just growing nutmeg. Well, doesn't that prove a lot?

Anyway, well -- all over, you see this creativity. You look [at] what I saw last week in Colombia blew me away. They felt, and what they said was, Farabundo Marti became the personification of the people of El Salvador, and Cesar Sandino became the personification of the people of Nicaragua. And now we have decided that our person for Colombia is Father Camilo Torres. And our movement now, the Camilo Torres movement," which had signed a declaration that very week. I felt like I was at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the United States. To see these people saying, "This is the movement of Camilo Torres. It is open; we are public. We are here, we are available; we stand for the overthrow of the oligarchy of Colombia. Total solidarity with the people of Central America. And at that point, shortly after that point, Ernesto Cardinal said, "If the gringos start to invade us in Nicaragua, will you send international brigades?" And there was an immediate response, a unanimous response of Colombia's desire, not institutionally, but from the people themselves, to go to aid Nicaragua as requested.

So we see the march of history, as we look at these two revolutions, we even find some of the sad cases of history. We remember the sad case of Huber Matos in the Cuban Revolution, one who after victory was feeling, well, you know, now we've got do do things, kind of get back to business the way it was.  We see that in the position taken by Eden Pastora in Nicaragua. We find people who are going to start the position of saying that the leadership has betrayed the revolution. I think that that's unfortunate. These are sad things that happen, but we have to look at them and see them and understand that the people are going to move ahead, that this is not an individualistic type of thing, that this is a movement of all the people.

Possibly some of the differences we could see in the structures of the later revolution, that is, of what has happened in Nicaragua is, of course, the widely-shared leadership. Fidel became the personification of the Cuban Revolution. In Nicaragua they have always enjoyed when someone says, "Who's in charge?", they would say, "In charge of what?" So there has been a wider distribution of leadership. I do think that is progress. I like the idea and I think that it is something that would be looked upon as the future in this type of movement.

Self-criticism is always a part and always should be a part of any movement. The Cubans are very strong on that. Fidel, of course, is always very humble to say we have made many mistakes, we have done many things wrong, and I've found that to be true in the Sandinista leadership as well. They're very quick to say well, maybe we have made some mistakes. I think that we have to see them at this time, which is a moment of crisis, that we're in right now, not only for Cuba, but for Nicaragua and for the One America, as Marti called it. He called it Nuestra America.  It is one America and it is under attack, and this is the critical moment for it, with the flotilla there in Central America, ready to move in whatever area, I think we have to have a clear voice of outrage here in the United States, making it clear that we will not accept this kind of attack. There will be no business as usual here at home while these attacks are going on.

During the Vietnam War, there were 264 times when the military of the United States was called out to maintain order domestically. That's 264 times that mayors and governors and other representatives said we can't control it. I remember seeing Washington, D.C., being administered by 10,000 troops of the military. It actually was the night that Martin Luther King [Jr.) was killed. The city was burning and the tanks were in the streets and that was only one example of such domestic unrest. I don't think that there is any way that we can stand to see Central America destroyed and to go on with business as usual at home.

I think we have to understand the seriousness of that and make sure that our government understands the seriousness of that. This is a Latin part of the world, that where we sit was stolen in 1848 from Mexico along with half of that country; that we aren't as illiterate as we used to be. We understand politics a little better today, and that we are going to support the people of Central America with solidarity. We have to point up the level of malice of our own leadership and one of the ways that came to my mind in visiting South America and talking to the South Americans, last week, was the mentality of the conquistadores, who lived there.

They believed, when they came in from Spain, that they had the truth, they were Roman Catholic, the believed in God, and they had a spirit of coming to conquer the Indians, and they believed that no Jew, no protest or no atheist had a right to live. And with the Spanish Inquisition they massacred people. Don't forget that now. If you weren't a true believer, they would kill you, in the Spanish Inquisition. That was no fun and games. That was torture and death because you did not believe in the true God.

Now naturally many of the perpetrators of that massacre didn't believe themselves. They certainly were no saints. They were using it as a way of manipulating the peasants. What I'm saying is that this is the mark of a conquistador, to say "I have the truth. You don't have it. I have a right to kill you." The very same mentality exists today with people who are so crass as to be able to say, "Because you are a socialist, because you are a Communist, I have a right to kill you." What's the difference between that mentality and and the mentality of the Spaniards at the time of the earlier colonial. You have no right, or there is no such right. The sooner we get that point across to the really low level of criminals that are involved in high places in the United States. The sooner we make that point, the better off we're going to be.

People don't have to apologize for being socialists. They don't have to apologize for being Communists. They don't have to apologize for wanting to change the economic system of the world. No apologies are called for unless you support the idea that 40,000 children should die every day of hunger as they do in the rotten system that we have today. Unless you support the fact that as we look at the friends of the United States all around the world, that it's hard to find people that are more vile that we find in the leadership of places like the Philippine Islands, Chile, our other friends in El Salvador. They're called "friends". Guatemala, we call them "friends". What kind of friends to we have?

We have people that have total contempt for their own who live in the country that they represent. And that contempt is necessary. It is not accidental that you have a Rios Montt, or that you had a Batista in Cuba. It is necessary to find someone with total contempt of his own, so that he can allow foreigners in to get the profit from the blood, sweat and tears of their own people, take their profit, give it to the foreigners, participate in the riches for yourself and a few of your cronies and left everybody else go to hell. That's the pattern, and that's the pattern that has no future. It has no future, whether it be in Nicaragua, in Cuba or in the United States as well.

This is what we have to see. That we have a march of history. History does not go backwards. That we have to show respect for the people of the United States, show the same respect for the people that live in this country as you know the Cubans showed to you when you visited there. Show the same respect that revolutionary people all over would show for you. A revolutionary people do not believe in racism. Racism isn't part of it. Ethnic states aren't part of revolutionary change, where we're going to have everybody believing in the same faith, or being a part of the same linguistic background. States that are revolutionary are pluralistic. They have many different religious backgrounds. They have many racial backgrounds. We don't get into the glorification of one racial group, of one ethnic group, of one religious group. Pluralism is the answer.

States are secular by their very nature. The people in the states can be enormously religious, but if they attempt to make their religion a requirement for being part of the state, they do not go beyond the conquistadores of old. That's the scene we're in. There are many comparisons between the Cuba of 1959 and Nicaragua of 1979-1983. Many comparisons and there are many differences. Maybe you would have any questions before we fold up today.

(End of lecture)