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Title: Declaration of Principles
Author: Cuban Libertarian Movement
Date: 2003
Language: en
Topics: Cuba, principles
Source: Retrieved on July 6, 2010 from https://web.archive.org/web/20100706140241/http://movimientolibertariocubano.entodaspartes.net/english-texts-of-mlc-or-about-the-cuban-anarchism-anarchists-1/

Cuban Libertarian Movement

Declaration of Principles

Since it has always been an inescapable duty, consistant with our

principles and agreements, the Cuban anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists

have been, and are in a struggle for liberty, social justice and

libertarian socialism. Since the moment in the 19^(th) century when we

pioneered the worker’s movement in Cuba, we continue the social struggle

started by those generations against colonial oppression, imperialist

North American intervention, international capitalism, bourgeois

republics, the dictatorships of Machado, Batista and the totalitarian

government of the last forty four years; we remain committed to a series

of social concepts and ideas which we will not renounce for any reason.

As Cuba lives through one of the most painful periods of her history, we

Cuban anarchists present this document, continuing the tradition of

denouncing and fighting state power, be it colonialist, capitalist,

dictatorial or today’s totalitarian system. We have fought and denounced

these wrongs before the founding of the Asociacion Libertaria de Cuba

and later, in the First Congress of 1944, the Second Congress of 1948,

the Third Congress of 1950, the International Libertarian Conference of

1955, the Declaration of Principles of 1960 and those from the exile

since 1965, the Declaration of the Libertarian Movement of 1975, the

editorials in the Libertarian Information Bulletin until 1979, the

Guangara Libertaria until 1994, and in many declarations and speeches in

diverse fora in 1979, 1988, 1993 and 1995, denouncing as well the Castro

regime at international encounters in Italy, France, Mexico, Spain and

the United States.

Whereas:

Since 1959 until today the Cuban government, self-proclaimed

“socialist” and represented only by the personality of its “Maximum

Leader” in a fascist fashion, oppresses and assassinates our class

brothers and sisters, assuming the functions of Sole Tyrant in the name

of the Cuban people.

After over forty four years of despotism without equal in this

hemisphere, the Cuban people find themselves mired in poverty,

corruption and forced obedience, without rights of any kind, brutally

and inhumanely threatened and terrorized by the regime’s political

police, with a judicial and correctional system comparable to that of

Nazi Germany or the Soviet Gulags.

The long-suffering Cuban proletariat (industrial and agricultural

workers), falsely represented by vertical and fossilized unions of

fascist ideology, finds itself trapped inside a social system that

persecutes and imprisons for such acts as trying to organize freely; a

system that exploits and discriminates, racially and politically,

without the right to strike, protest and boycott. Against so much abuse,

it needs to free itself of the infamous chains that oppress it.

As men and women committed to freedom, we have decided to make public

this document and to struggle from our barricades with all our strength

to obtain freedom, to the last of our comrades and to the end of our

lives.

We declare that:

The Cuban crisis is our first priority.

As internationalists we have the duty to support our anarchist

comrades throughout the world and those class brothers and sisters who,

from the ranks of other ideologies akin to our principles, ask for our

solidarity.

We are against all states and their representatives, against all

governments and empires that attempt to globalize, centralize or

dominate the rest of Humanity.

We are not interested in the fight for political power, but we always

oppose any fascist, capitalist or clasist enemy, now or in the future.

Consistent with the idea that all political governments have their roots

in religion, we manifest our opposition to all religions and churches as

well as those philosophies and ideologies that oppose the critical

development of all human beings.

We aspire to the total emancipation of the working class, giving the

Cuban proletariat our main attention and interest, given the

socio-political situation it finds itself: a tragic quagmire without

parallel in our continent.

We will offer our fraternal solidarity to any group, sector and/or

movement anywhere in the world that adopts as its beginning and end

goals liberty and social justice for their own people. Internationalism

always starts at the closest place of struggle. We support all oppressed

and exploited people’s struggle for their liberation from domination,

whether imperialist or domestic. We celebrate the beauty of human

diversity and acknowledge the social and cultural contributions of all

communities on the planet. We will keep all kinds of free and fraternal

relationships with said sectors, anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist, in or

outside Cuba.

We are enemies of capitalism and consumerism. We support all forms of

resistance to the current capitalist exploitation: strikes, sabotage,

workplace struggles, the squatting of buildings, rent strikes, and

struggles for the communal control of resources. We desire the abolition

of the wage and production system; therefore we are opposed to Capital

recovery and the continuation of the system of production in any shape

or form, including the imposition of state capitalism. We understand

that if production is the basis for the exploitation perpetuated by

Capital, changing the forms of production means changing the forms of

exploitation, not their elimination.

We are against the state in all its forms. We are opposed to all

states without distinction of ideology and we fight to abolish them. The

objective of the state is to maintain and regulate domination. The state

has the monopoly on violence, the mechanisms to impart “justice” and

organized terror: the police, the army and the prison system.

We are against the prison and “social adaptation” systems, seeing them

as ways of control by the state to perpetuate the privileges of the

ruling class.

We are against immigration systems and declare freedom of travel

beyond our fictitious state boundaries a basic human right.

We are against the ideology of the authoritarian left that pretends to

“transform” the state, recovering its structures in order to keep power

via the so-called “proletarian state”, as well as the current discourse

of the democratic left that postulates “the need to democratize the

state” inferring that “an strategy in accordance with the times must

arrive at the occupation of the state” instead of its old proposal to

“conquer it”. This position of expecting everything from the state and

within the state logically brings the postponement of all social

struggles and perpetuates the democratic game offering “everybody” the

possibility to “participate” in the electoral farce. 8.4. We are against

the regressive pretensions of the conservative reaction (clasist,

clerical, fascist) that aspires to return to a disgraceful and corrupt

past.

We fight for a society based on equity and equality among people

without distinctions of gender. We are for the liberation and

self-determination of women; therefore we oppose the patriarchal and

androcentric system of domination.

We fight against racism. We favor cultural diversity. We are conscious

of the historical discrimination against the Afro-Cuban people, since

the days of the slavery to the present, and we affirm our struggle for

the self-determination of Black people. Likewise we acknowledge the

historical oppression of the indigenous peoples of America. We stand in

solidarity with their libertarian struggles for self-management, control

over their resources, justice and dignity.

We reject mandatory heterosexuality imposed by patriarchal culture and

recognize sexual diversity in human relations. We support the

self-determination of lesbians, homosexuals and bisexuals.

We are against the capitalist industrial system, built on the

exploitation of the planet and its inhabitants. We fight as well against

the savage destruction of the Cuban ecosystem by Castro’s dictatorship.

We support the struggle of all movements of resistance against the

continuous destruction of the environment. We acknowledge the need for

revolutionary transformation of our relationship with the planet and the

species that inhabit it.

We will fight on all fronts to reestablish in the proletariat the

anarcho-syndicalist ideals that were trampled by authoritarian

“socialism” and torn away by the Castro’s regime. Socialism must always

go hand in hand with liberty.

We affirm that:

We object to the political repression established by the Castro

fascist state.

The political police must be disbanded.

The death penalty must be abolished immediately.

All political and social prisoners must be set free immediately.

The military service must be abolished and the military institution

disbanded. In its place there will be organized, free and spontaneously,

self-defense collectives, empowering links with those antimilitarist

sectors that inform their actions from a libertarian point of view.

The abolition of the state is an immediate and realizable necessity.

We acknowledge the people’s ability to organize their lives and their

communities without the need for political, economic, and military

parasites.

Conclusions:

The Cuban Libertarian Movement, consistent and coherent with its ideals

of libertarian socialism, social justice, self-management, class

organization, autonomous municipality, individual and collective freedom

for the Cuban people, is once again confronting Castro’s fascist

totalitarianism. We live in times of resurgence of the libertarian

ideal, where the growth of the international protest movement is

evident; today, more than ever, we glimpse the dawn of freedom and we

deem it necessary to fight against Cuba’s totalitarian despotism, with

our comrades in the island as well as with anarchists throughout the

world.

We urge all revolutionary libertarian groups to coordinate their efforts

with ours in the struggle for a libertarian socialist society. It is not

about adding up ideological coincidences, but to sum our efforts in

committed revolutionary praxis, in real confrontation on all levels and

all planes, in the face of neocolonialist attacks and global militarism

and capitalism. The social revolution that we must bring about comes out

of the real needs of the oppressed, out of the real movement of the

exploited, affirming their desire to live in a free and humane society

that will once and for all break with all ideologies of death, product

of exploitation and oppression in the name of progress. Comrades, let’s

be what we really are and take on the struggle. Let’s assume the

consistent and revolutionary practice of Anarchism.