THE Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon — the short and more popular version is Huks — was essentially a revolutionary movement of patrician intellectuals who did the theorizing and educating side, and commoners who made up the fighting force. The most prominent of these intellectuals were the Lavas of Bulacan province, armed with graduate degrees in the hard sciences from the best American universities yet highly steeped in Marxist dialectical materialism. Casto Alejandrino, from the Arayat, Pampanga-based clan that sent its young to Madrid to study with Jose Rizal and the La Solidaridad group at universities there, was both a highly-trained guerilla tactician and a Marxist intellectual.

The éminence grise of the Marxist intellectuals then was, of course, Pedro Abad Santos, brother of the martyred Jose Abad Santos. Perico, as Pedro was called, once owned the most extensive collection of Marxist literature in our part of Asia.