A-Infos (en) Cuban Libertarian Movement Declaration of Principles Fall 2003

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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
19th 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:

1 - 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.

2 - 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.

3 - 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.

4 - 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:

1 - The Cuban crisis is our first priority.

2 - 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.

3 - We are against all states and their representatives, against all
governments and empires that attempt to globalize, centralize or
dominate the rest of Humanity.

4 - 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.

5 - 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.

6 - 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.

7 - 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.

8 - 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. 8.1 - 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. 8.2 - We are against immigration
systems and declare freedom of travel beyond our fictitious state
boundaries a basic human right. 8.3 - 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.

9 - 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.

10 - 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.

11 - 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.

12 - 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.

13 - 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:

1 - We object to the political repression established by the Castro
fascist state. 2 - The political police must be disbanded. 3 - The
death penalty must be abolished immediately. 4 - All political and
social prisoners must be set free immediately. 5 - 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. 6 -
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.

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