Fidel and his concept of PEOPLE. Presence of a SUR approach in his thought since the Moncada trial (3rd. part).
The concept of the people offered by Fidel in History Will Absolve Me is not the result of a classical defensive thesis, of a discourse unilaterally threaded from the Law, it is more a political than a juridical concept, which constitutes at the same time root and sap of an emerging Political Science, emerged for emancipation, as the voice of the oppressed, of the exploited, of the colonized, of the vilified, of the underdeveloped peoples, a science of those of the South, subjected by the always colonizing, always subjugating, always «superior» North.
The people Fidel spoke of at the Moncada trial were not the people the dictatorship mocked in its acolyte press days after the assault, when it said, in bad faith, that the people had not supported the movement, thus showing the submission and cowardice of the people themselves. Those people who did not know what was happening in Moncada, who initially thought that it was a confrontation between soldiers, since the mass media were silenced.
The people were the nurses of the Saturnino Lora Civil Hospital in Santiago de Cuba, who themselves loaded the rifles of the Moncadist fighters who had taken the position and from there defended themselves. The people, aware of the action, had seconded the movement, it was the people that after hours of the assault and before the bloody hunt of the soldiers of the tyranny, took care in their homes of the young people who saved their lives and who later testified in the winding judicial process followed against the combatants. Those young men owed their lives to the people who preserved them, took care of them and fed them, in a supportive and courageous way, but to declare it would have meant a betrayal against that people. Those same people protected Fidel and a small group of comrades during the following week of resistance in the mountains near Santiago de Cuba.
In the Program announced by Fidel in the defense plea for the Moncada events, the most urgent solutions were announced, which would signify a group of laws enunciated by him, among them, the second revolutionary law, which granted the non-seizable and non-transferable ownership of the land to the settlers, subcolonists, tenants, sharecroppers and squatters who occupied plots of five or less caballerias of land, the State compensating their previous owners on the basis of the rent that they would earn for those plots in an average of ten years.
Dr Osvaldo M.Álvarez Torres.