Raul Garcia

Raul Garcia Alvarez (21 August 1894-3 April 1962) was a Cerveran revolutionary and politician who was the founding father of the Cerveran People's Directorate and its National Directivist Party. Ideologically a, his applications of Duvalist thought to political, economic, military and social affairs are collectively known as Directivism.

Early Life and Education
Raul Garcia Alvarez was born to Jorge Garcia Salas and Rosa Alvarez Guardiola on 21 August 1894, the eldest of three brothers. Jorge, the son of a farmer, had sold the family farm and used the proceeds to move to the city of Bayamo in 1883, where he opened a print shop and publishing house and established a comfortably middle class lifestyle for his family. The liberal, bordering on radical, political climate of Bayamo and frequent exposure to various political tracts and pamphlets the family business took on as commissions had an early and lasting impact on Raul, as did frequent inspections and harassments by the authorities. In line with Jorge's humanist values, all three Garcia brothers were educated in secular schools as opposed to the more common parochial institutions run by the Marian Church. Raul in particular excelled in his studies, being described as bookish and philosophical in imitation of his father, to whom he was especially close.

In 1911, Garcia graduated from Public High School No. 17 with a humanities diploma and traveled to Matanzas, where he intended to sit the entrance exam for law school; for unknown reasons, but likely related to his father's political activities, he was rejected prior to examination.

Matanzas Years
Dejected, Garcia wrote to his father to ask for advice in the summer of 1911. Writing in response, Jorge advised his son to continue efforts to obtain college admission, if not as a lawyer than in another field of letters. A further two unsuccessful attempts at law school, and one at a teacher's college, followed in Garcia's three years in Matanzas, during which time he worked a series of odd jobs to support himself and supplanted his meagre income with petty crime, gambling and bookmaking. During this period he lived in a boardinghouse with other young unmarried men and developed a friendship with his fellow boarders, whom he described in later recollections as "not hardened criminals by any means, but certainly no angels either." This exposure to the working class life of Matanzas, he would write later, began his political awakening, demonstrating the harsh realities of the urban poor and the extent to which vice and criminal activity became activities of necessity and survival among them. In spite of this, there is no evidence that Garcia ever joined a political organization while in Matanzas, as communism was still in its infancy in Cervera at that time.

In 1914 Garcia abruptly returned to Bayamo, reportedly to avoid gambling debts, and began work in his father's print shop.

Bayamo Years and Occupation
Despite earlier setbacks, Garcia initially settled into life in Bayamo as his father's assistant and continuing his political and philosophical education by means of commissions the shop undertook. Increasingly drawn to the writings of Marie-Helene Duval, Garcia joined the Communist Party of Cervera in 1915. This first experience with organized communism saw Garcia clash with party leadership, whom he described as petty-bourgeois intellectuals and criticized for a perceived lack of action to bring about socialism; they in turn distrusted Garcia, whom they regarded as brash, arrogant and hotheaded, and a potential liability. By winter of 1915 Garcia had ceased regular attendance at party meetings, though he continued to pay membership dues.

In 1916 a mounting sovereign debt crisis saw the government of Rogelio Batista deposed by a SiWallqanqa-backed junta, which installed Colonel Xavier Rios as dictator. Both the coup and the imposition of a puppet regime caused widespread popular outrage, particularly in Bayamo and surrounding areas where pro-government and pro-Junta forces clashed throughout the year. In January 1917, with junta control firmly established, the Garcia print shop was shuttered as part of a press crackdown, with Jorge being arrested and tortured in an apparent effort to turn him informant. He did not provide any names of dissidents and refused to cooperate, ultimately dying of his injuries in February 1917. Now thoroughly radicalized, Raul began active participation in protests and civil disobedience campaigns against the regime, including an Easter protest at the Cathedral of San Marin de Bayamo which was suppressed by force, with seven killed. The following week, Raul circulated a pamphlet entitled Siete Mártires del Pueblo ("Seven Martyrs of the People") condemning the regime and calling for a "people's uprising" to retake the country and establish a "people's state" in place of both the junta and the Republic which preceded it. Published under the name of the Communist Party of Cervera, the pamphlet was quickly repudiated and denounced by the remnants of the Party not already imprisoned or in exile, and Garcia arrested for its publication on 19 April 1917.

Imprisonment and Birth of Directivism
Initially facing sedition charges and the possibility of execution, Garcia was ultimately charged and convicted on a number of lesser charges including obscenity, contempt of religion and inciting a breach of the peace. The exact reasons for the shift in prosecutorial attitude have never been fully understood and theories range from a desire of the regime to de-escalate the situation in Bayamo to mere bribery of public officials by Garcia's sympathizers. Sentenced to fifteen years with hard labor, Garcia was transported on May 6 1917 to Isla de Las Almas, the maximum security prison facility established by the regime for political rivals, despite his official status as a common criminal. The following day, he received a letter from the Communist Party informing him of his expulsion.

Conditions on Las Almas were harsh, with fourteen hour work days in the stone quarries and prisoners forbidden to speak to one another. In spite of these harsh restrictions, Las Almas proved fertile ideological ground for Garcia, who soon made the company of various anarchists, revolutionary nationalists and socialists who had been imprisoned there. These friendships were cemented by a common desire to overthrow the junta government and equal disdain for the liberal democracy which they regarded as having enabled it. From these disparate threads, Garcia and others began to build the framework of what would become Directivism: a socialist outlook which focused on the building of a proletarian-driven national consciousness as a precursor to an eventual communist state, to be driven by a "Directive Party" composed of and engaged with the working classes. The first drafts of the Directivist manifesto were written and circulated in secret in Las Almas between 1917 and 1922, before Garcia was moved to a minimum security facility outside Resistencia in the interior, in an effort to curtail the growing radicalization at Las Almas.

In 1924, with the junta's foreign support crumbling, Garcia was released from prison as part of a drive by the Rios government to legitimize itself domestically and abroad. Rather than return to Bayamo, he settled in the working class Tallapiedra district of Matanzas, where the National Directivist Party was founded on 9 March.