If someone in the history of Cuba betrayed the ideals proclaimed at the beginning of his revolution, that was Fidel Castro.
Havana.- In Cuba, about the revolutions that occurred since 1868- and that Castro historiography is absurdly committed to presenting as one, from Yara’s cry to that of Fidel Castro– It is recurring, until tiredness, the story of “the betrayed revolution” and “the traitors to the revolution.”
It was thus from the war for independence, when the autonomists were considered as traitors to the libertarian cause as the guerrillas who, together with the Spanish forces, fought the mambises.
On many occasions, that narrative of “the traitors” was nothing more than a manic resource to ventilate dark quarrels or a pretext to demonize and get rid of political adversaries.
The narrative of the betrayed revolution – which “went to Bolina,” according to Raúl Roa – reached its peak after the overthrow of the regime of Gerardo Machadomainly in the mouth of the communists. Paradoxically, the first ones who betrayed the revolutionary groups were themselves, when they agreed with Machado and withdrew their support for the general strike of August 1933, in exchange for the promise made by the dictator to legalize them as a political party.
The betrayal of the communists to the revolution was followed by that of Fulgencio Batista. The Sergeant Tachygraph that, for being the only one of his plot colleagues who had a car, assumed the direction of the military assonada of September 4, 1933, after being promoted to Colonel and head of the Army for the Pentarchy, ended up being part of a random equation of the government that had Ramón Grau San Martín as President already Antonio Guiteras as secretary of the Interior. But that provisional government was overthrown by Batista, who agreed with the United States to recognize the new government in exchange for imposing order in the country, repressing many of those who had been their allies.
For more than a decade, the argument of “the betrayed revolution” – without specifying what the betrayal was – was the alibi for a bloody adjustment of accounts between various gangs, euphemistically called “Action Groups”. It was the heavy Phardo who imposed his revolutionary past in the fight against Machado’s dictatorship to Presidents Ramón Grau and Carlos Prío.
According to calculations from the press of the time, in the second half of the 1940s there were about twenty thousand armed men – self -devoted to half of the national army troops – linked to a greater or lesser extent to political gangsterism and the revolutionary camorra.
In one of those gun gangs, the revolutionary insurrectional union (UIR), whose leader was Emilio Tro, began Fidel Castro his adventures.
If someone in the history of Cuba betrayed the ideals proclaimed at the beginning of his revolution, that was Fidel Castro. After overthrowing Batista in 1959 and seizing power, he did not restore the 1940 Constitution or made free elections, as he had promised. And, despite denying being a communist and having aspirations of power, in 1961 Marxist-Leninist was proclaimed and established a personalist dictatorship of Stalinist court.
Despite his betrayal of the ideals that had originally raised, Fidel Castro had no qualms about accusing “traitors to the revolution” to those who opposed the dictatorial and communist course taken by his regime, including many of those who had accompanied him in the insurrection, to which he shot or condemned long prison sentences.
