This is an excellent translation of one of the basic documents of the Castro revolutionary movement. The original of the document was prepared in prison while Castro was awaiting trial after his ill-fated effort of July 26, 1953, to overturn Batista, and was used as the defence speech at the trial itself. A long list of misdeeds of Batista and his henchmen is presented as evidence that rebellion against the dictatorship was legal under the Cuban Constitution of 1940, Article 40 of which stated: “It is legitimate to use adequate resistance to protect previously granted individual rights.” Not content to rest his ease solely on constitutional grounds, Castro cited an imposing array of writers to justify the right of revolution—John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Juan Mariana, François Hotman, John Knox, John Poynet, John Milton, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine—followed by quotations from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
The address also contained an outline of the reform program Castro had planned to institute—which plan he has used since in his successful rebellion. This program was based on the long overlooked Articles 88-90 of the Constitution of 1940 which provided for state ownership of mineral resources and of natural resources in general, for the use of all property for the public good, and which made provision for the expropriation of large estates. The title of this volume bids fair to become a source of embarrassment to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee which sponsored it, to say nothing of the contents of the work itself, for Castro has become a dictator himself, and more and more of the accusations leveled at the malodorous Batista regime are being hurled at his own dictatorship.
