Cuba - Historical and Ethnographic Essays (1961)

from "Cuba: Historical and Ethnographic Essays"

(Moscow, 1961)

Ernesto Che Guevara

"Power was achieved through the development of the peasant struggle, by way of organising and arming peasants under the slogans of agrarian reform and other just demands of this class. But unity was maintained with the working class, with whose help final victory was achieved. In other words, the revolution came to the town and the rural area in three basic stages. The first was the establishment of a small guerrilla unit and the second was when this unit, now expanded, sent some of its troops to operate in a specific, but still confined zone. The third stage arrived when these partisan units came together to form a revolutionary army which inflicted defeat on the reactionary army in open battle. The struggle that began when the objective and subjective conditions had not yet fully ripened for the seizure of power, facilitated the demarcation of basic political forces and the emergence of conditions for the seizure of power. The high point of this struggle was the victory of the revolution on January 1, 1959."