Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (Spanish: Comités de Defensa de la Revolución), or CDR, is a network of neighborhood committees across Cuba. The organizations, described as the "eyes and ears of the Revolution", exist to promote social welfare and report on "counter-revolutionary" activity. As of 2010, 8.4 million Cubans of the national population of 11.2 million, were registered as CDR members.
The CDR system was formed by Fidel Castro on September 28, 1960, following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, which overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. The slogan of the CDR is, "¡En cada barrio, Revolución!" ("In every neighborhood, Revolution!"). Fidel Castro proclaimed it "a collective system of revolutionary vigilance." Established, "So that everybody knows who lives on every block, what they do on every block, what relations they have had with the tyranny, in what activities are they involved and with whom do they meet."
Read more about Committees For The Defense Of The Revolution: Activities
Famous quotes containing the words committees, defense and/or revolution:
“When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.”
—Lewis Thomas (b. 1913)
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)
“You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)