For nearly 400 years, the island of Cuba was among Spain’s foremost and most loyal colonial possessions in the Americas. After “discovering” Cuba on Columbus’s first voyage, the Spanish established their earliest settlement on the island at Baracoa, toward the east, in 1511. San Cristobal de la Habana, the future capital, was founded four years later. Governor Diego Velazquez, a conquistador (not to be confused with the 17th-century painter of the same name), quickly succeeded in defeating small pockets of native Taíno resistance. By midcentury, Cuba’s indigenous population had declined to less than a few thousand due to disease, mass suicides, and forced incorporation into the ranks of emerging colonial settlements.
Over the next two centuries, Cuba served two primary purposes as a colony. First, with the Florida Straits a natural gateway to Spanish colonial possessions (and their vast mineral riches) in the rest of the hemisphere, Cuba became a key stopping-off point for commerce between the new world and the old. Indeed, it was from Cuba that Hernán Cortés launched his expedition that began the conquest of Mexico. Havana thus boomed as a city with a strong merchant and financial tradition. Second, Cuba developed a number of important industries of its own, namely, tobacco, coffee, and sugar. As a result, although the Spanish had settled neighboring Hispaniola first, Cuba emerged as the preeminent Spanish colonial possession in the Americas.
Michael Bustamante’s contribution to this first section of the book was especially invaluable.
Without a significant indigenous population, African slavery became the primary means to supply labor to Cuba’s agricultural industries. The first reports of African slaves on the island date back as early as 1513, and by 1774, a census reported that 25% of Cuba’s total population of 173,000 were African slaves (another 18% were free blacks, or slaves that had been permitted to earn their freedom). By the mid-1800s, the combined totals of free and enslaved blacks accounted for well over 50% of the island’s population. Slave revolts occurred sporadically throughout the colonial period, and pressure for abolition gradually built as Great Britain first abolished the slave trade (1807), then abolished the institution of slavery altogether (1830s). Yet slavery in Cuba would only be partially eliminated in 1868.
The growth of Cuba’s agricultural industries over time drew the island progressively closer to its neighbor to the north, not the Spanish crown. During the 10-month British occupation of Havana in 1762–63, Havana was also temporarily free from Spain’s excessive and extensive taxation policies. This economic shift planted the seeds for a wider political change as well, as more Cubans than ever before gained a concrete image of what life free of the Spanish crown might be like. With independence from Great Britain in 1783, ties between the United States and Cuba only increased, as the new country was no longer bound to previous colonial trade agreements with other British colonies throughout the Caribbean. And while Spain attempted sporadically to route Cuban trade through the mother country or within the Spanish empire, sugar exports and other forms of direct commerce with the United States continued to expand (particularly during the era of Europe’s Napoleonic Wars) as loyalist Spanish colonial authorities gained more autonomy from the Spanish crown.
Between roughly 1810 and 1825, Spain’s colonial empire fell apart, the victim of a substantially declining power base, domestic unrest within Spain, imperial overstretch, and a spate of powerful independence movements led by such dynamic leaders as Simon Bolivar, José de San Martín, and Miguel Hidalgo. Cuba, however, remained “ever faithful,” becoming one of Spain’s only remaining colonial possessions in the Americas. The reasons for this “loyalty” varied. Grievances against the Spanish state were certainly not lacking, especially among the criollo (or Cuban-born) class of merchants, businessmen, and landowners who lacked the privileges of their loyalist peninsular (Spaniard elites in Cuba) rivals. Criollos bore the brunt of heavy taxation policies implemented to prop up a weakening Spanish crown, leading many to support independence (as described in greater detail on page 4, “How did Cuba’s independence movement gain momentum, and what was its relationship to abolition?”). Moreover, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars’ disruption of Spanish monarchical rule, the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution of 1812, and Spain’s transition to a form of constitutional monarchy after an 1820–23 Civil War, criollos’ own utter lack of say in the governing of local Cuban affairs seemed all the more hypocritical.
Nonetheless, at the outbreak of independence struggles elsewhere in Latin America, Spain did make key concessions to criollos in Cuba. Royal decrees permitted criollos to openly trade with vessels from other countries in Cuban ports and granted full legal rights to the land they occupied. In addition, many criollos recognized that their own economic clout rested on the institution of slavery. As a result, elites looked with great trepidation to the example of Haiti, where just a few years earlier, Toussaint L’Ouverture had initiated a rebellion that eventually led to the proclamation of a “negro republic.” Fears of unleashing a restless slave population and contending with massive social upheaval tempered the desirability of independence, at least for a time.
Meanwhile, the United States eyed Cuba carefully, looking toward not only commercial opportunities but also territorial expansion. In 1823, Secretary of State and future president John Quincy Adams called both Cuba and Puerto Rico “natural appendages of the North American continent.” He reasoned, “There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, can not choose but to fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature can not cast her off from its bosom.” At several occasions during the mid-1800s, as Spain underwent a series of domestic dynastic conflicts (the Carlist Wars), the United States offered to purchase Cuba outright, but Madrid refused. As a society in which slavery was still widely practiced, Cuba became a potentially attractive acquisition for those southern states then in the midst of fending off abolitionist drives from the North.
That Cubans did not free themselves from Spain in the early 1800s does not mean they lost their desire for independence. Individual activists and organized movements pushed for the end of Spanish colonial rule over Cuba throughout the 19th century, often inspired by the American, French, and various Latin American revolutions. As early as the first decade of the 1800s, secret societies plotted, revolts were planned and suppressed, and Spanish authorities discovered hidden schemes. Among those early activists well known for pushing the cause of independence are Father Felix Varela, José Antonio Saco (famous for his open appeals for reforming Spanish administration), and José María Heredia (Cuba’s first revolutionary poet).
In some cases, the cause of abolition merged in varying degrees with the independence drive, as in the work of Saco and several abolitionist conspiracies. The leadership of free blacks like José Manuel Aponte (who led a conspiracy in 1812) was often important. The 1840s “Ladder Conspiracy,” an alleged plot named after a preferred method of torture for slaves, included the participation of some of Cuba’s most well-known criollo independence supporters, sympathetic to abolition as well.
Another important faction emerged, however, between those seeking independence and those loyal to Spain: annexation-ists. Whether driven by commercial ties or fears of black uprisings, some elites who opposed Spain’s mismanagement of the island’s affairs opted for incorporating Cuba into the United States as a way to gain greater freedom while preserving their privileges and the workings of a slave economy. Annexationists found vocal supporters in the United States and at times were responsible for armed plots of their own. Perhaps the most well known are the handful of filibustering expeditions led by a former general in the Spanish Army, Narcisco López, often with U.S. citizens as mercenaries. Following his capture and execution, López’s supporters throughout the U.S. South established a secret society that would plot to participate in several additional conspiracies.
By the 1860s, clamors for independence and abolition had grown to a fever pitch, especially in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. In 1868, after conspiring with fellow partisans of the independence cause, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a wealthy landowner from eastern Cuba, issued the Grito de Yara, liberating his slaves and announcing that they were free to join him in a war against colonial Spain. Ironically, his action had been indirectly inspired by events in Spain, where reformers had succeeded in overthrowing the corrupt Spanish government at the time. As unrest spread across the country, Generals Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez (a Dominican native) assumed leadership of the rag-tag rebel army. After 10 years of inconclusive conflict, rebels and the Spanish agreed to end the war with the 1878 Pact of Zanjón, an agreement that granted amnesty to those who had participated in the conflict and freedom to those slaves who had fought in the rebel army. Several of Cuba’s independence leaders refused to recognize the pact, however, and launched a short-lived attempt at reigniting the rebellion between 1879 and 1880.
In subsequent years, Cuba entered a period of relative calm but significant change. Slavery was formally abolished (at all levels and without exception) in 1886. Cuba’s sugar industry also entered a period of crisis in the 1880s as prices fell and growers were forced to mechanize and consolidate production to stay afloat—threatening the livelihoods of midsized planters and the new free slaves whom they employed. Domestic political upheaval in Spain led to the creation of the Liberal (or Autonomist) Party, which promised to carry out reform, grant Cuba greater autonomy, and permit the limited participation of criollos in Spanish legislative affairs.
At this time, the writings and activism of José Martí became central to the struggle for independence, whose epicenter had moved from Cuba to exile, along with many separatist leaders themselves. Born in Havana in 1853, Martí was too young to have played a large role in the Ten Years War, but was exiled to Spain at the age of 17 for his opposition to colonial rule. He eventually settled in New York, where he lived from 1881 to 1895. Essayist, poet, political thinker, organizer—a true cosmopolitan—Martí moved in a wide variety of social circles, alternately organizing support for independence causes and pursuing his art. His writings—both creative and nonfiction—played a fundamental role in creating a broader consciousness on and off the island for the cause of Cuban independence and the humanistic values that guided the struggle.
In addition to passionately supporting Cuban independence, Martí was also wary of U.S. designs—annexationist or otherwise. “I know the monster, because I have lived in its lair,” he wrote, “and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.” In legendary writings like the 1892 essay “Our America,” Martí helped establish the David versus U.S. Goliath mentality that has remained central to Cuba’s nationalist ethos ever since. A vocal critic of U.S. imperialism and expansionism, Martí stressed that the Americas should seek to be more unified and that Cuba could and should play a leading role in this effort. Among his greatest concerns were unequal power relations between races and classes, and the dearth of citizenship rights across the region. He argued for education as the basic motor for development throughout Latin America—a concept that would be a foundation of the Cuban Revolution’s social policies under Fidel Castro. At the same time, Martí held in high esteem such liberal values as freedom of the press and freedom of speech that were denied him and others in Cuba under Spanish rule. Artistically, Martí is credited as a key founder of Latin American modernism.
In 1892, from New York, Martí founded and assumed leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), an effort to unify conflicting factions of the independence movement under one umbrella organization. Fundamentally, Martí sought to unite Cubans around a vision of common principles and nationalism, calling in general terms for a Cuba without racial divisions or social cleavages. Over the course of three years, Martí negotiated a fragile consensus among separatist leaders, built the PRC’s support in exile, and secured funds and arms for a new revolutionary effort. Meanwhile, on the island, nearly two decades of Spanish promises of reform had shown little results. Renewed economic crisis in 1894 fed the flames of separatism once again. At Martí’s personal request, Generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo agreed to return to Cuba and assume military leadership of a new uprising.
On February 24, 1895, Cuba’s war for independence began with the Grito de Baire, a call by insurgents near Santiago de Cuba to begin their fighting. In subsequent months, Maceo, Gómez, and Martí landed on the island to join and lead growing ranks of rebels. Things went poorly at first. By May, Martí was dead, killed in his first and only appearance in battle. But by September, after registering several impressive victories over Spanish forces, rebel leaders met, elected a provisional revolutionary government, and chose to begin an invasion toward the western portion of the island under Maceo’s leadership. The campaign was largely a success, with troops crossing into the province of Havana and making their way to the western-most tip of the island. Spain’s captain-general of Cuba resigned his post and was replaced by General Valeriano Weyler, who instituted a brutal counterinsurgency policy of reconcentration, forcing all residents on the island to move to fortified Spanish areas within 8 days or face attack. By the end of 1896, it seemed the Spanish were on the verge of victory: Maceo had been killed, much of the western provinces had been pacified, and the rebel generals were distracted by constant battles with and within the Council of Government, the revolution’s civilian authority, over civilian-military prerogatives in the conduct of the war (a tension that would emerge 50 years later among future insurgencies). Still, by the beginning of 1898, rebel control over rural areas had been reestablished, and Spanish morale had been generally weakening.
The United States watched the war unfold with more than just casual interest. From the beginning, several sectors of political and public opinion clamored for U.S. involvement. In part, this excitement was generated by Cubans themselves. Rebel representatives based in New York City, led by future Cuban president Tomás Estrada Palma, brought accusations of Spanish brutality, especially under Weyler, to the attention of the city’s premier institutions of “yellow journalism,” namely, the papers of William Randolph Hearst. With such popular and favorable press coverage, supporters of Cuban independence were able to use the United States as a primary base to raise money, materials, and support for the war. For many Americans, including among leading African American intellectuals and media, the continued Spanish presence seemed to fly in the face of the anticolonial, postemancipation destiny of the Americas.
Yet U.S. opinion was still divided over Cuba’s future. By the time the war broke out, less than 20% of Cuba’s sugar mills were Cuban owned, and at least 95% of all of Cuba’s sugar exports were destined for the United States. United States owners and investors in the Cuban industry thus watched with horror as their properties (and the business interests of the United States) came under threat not only from the cruelty of the Spanish but also from rebel troops whose insurgency unleashed an uncompromising slash-and-burn strategy in the Cuban countryside. For some of these U.S. investors and some Washington politicians, autonomy but not complete independence for Cuba emerged as an enticing option. The administration of Grover Cleveland refused to grant Cuban rebels the status of belligerents. Indeed, early in the war, Cleveland’s secretary of state explicitly urged Spain to offer autonomy in order to avoid ultimate U.S. intervention. After all, more threatening than the prospect of continued violence was Cuban independence. Spain at first refused, convinced at the time of its ability to win the war. Yet it soon saw autonomy as the only hope of holding on to Cuba and in late 1897 established a local autonomous government based in Havana.
For the U.S. press, independence supporters, and the jingoist impulses that guided much of U.S. public opinion during this era of international manifest destiny, autonomy was unacceptable. “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war,” Hearst famously said to one of his cartoonists covering the conflict. Meanwhile, those involved in the Cuban independence movement, like Cuban revolutionaries in the next century, faced a challenging balancing act. They needed U.S. support and recognition as a way of countering Spanish half-a-loaf autonomy impulses while suspecting that too closely courting the United States could well threaten the independence and integrity of their movement (a fear shared by many leaders, including Gómez).
The final push for war came in February 1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine, sent to Havana Harbor to protect U.S. interests in the wake of popular riots against Spain, mysteriously exploded. Accusations flew of Spanish culpability. Then President William McKinley attempted to divert the hawkish prodding of his Republican Party colleagues and avoid war by offering to purchase Cuba outright from Spain or serve as a mediator in the conflict. Spain declined both options. The march to intervention thus became unstoppable. Cuban independence fighters were ill-informed of American plans and left out once the war began. The pro-independence Cuban junta in New York had helped to secure passage of the Teller Amendment in the U.S. Congress, a provision under which Washington disclaimed any intent to seek long-term control of the island. It would prove little assurance.
The war was over rather quickly. From the time the United States declared war in late April 1898 to the signing of an armistice in August, hardly three months had passed. During this short period, U.S. forces destroyed the Spanish navy and routed Spanish forces in its other colonial possessions: Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The United States and Spain signed a final peace treaty in December 1898 in Paris. Just as Cuban independence forces had been blocked from occupying key cities once the Spanish were defeated, they were not permitted to participate in the Paris negotiations. The American flag, not the Cuban flag, was raised over Havana. General Gómez, who once trusted American intentions, had been betrayed. He now spoke openly of an “unjustified military occupation.”
In early 1899, the United States formally began a military occupation of Cuba. Again, McKinley insulted the victorious partisans of Cuban independence by insisting that as many office holders as possible on the island (mayors, etc.—all of whom had answered to Spain) retain their positions to preserve some degree of order, a recurrent theme of American 20th-century expansion. The Cuban economy was in shambles and conditions on the island dire. Gómez and the other leaders of the independence struggle were in little position to resist the American presence, other than through public pronouncements and publications. Many Cubans, however, still trusted in the Teller Amendment and recognized the need for U.S. assistance in rebuilding the economy. Indeed, during the occupation, influxes of American capital and investment further tied Cuba’s sugar and other industries to those of the U.S. economy. Although McKinley kept open the door to possible annexation, pressure by anti-imperialists at home and the abiding power of Cuban nationalism prevented an outright takeover. Indeed, when the United States permitted municipal elections on the island, annexationist candidates lost across the board.
In 1900, General Leonard Wood, in charge of the U.S. occupation, called for a constitutional convention, a sign that the United States sought to end its military occupation. Participants in the convention included many well-known independence activists, with the notable exception of Gómez. In 1901, the convention approved a new constitution based largely on the American model. Soon afterward, the U.S. Congress passed the Platt Amendment, an attempt to place limits on Cuba’s sovereignty. In addition to constraining Cuba’s ability to conduct its own foreign affairs and international financial matters, the amendment granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuba for the “preservation of Cuban independence” and the adequate “protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” Cubans erupted into the streets in protest, and for several months the Constitutional Convention rejected the amendment or attempted to add several clarifications to its text. Finally, faced with little other way to secure an end to the American occupation, representatives at the Constitutional Convention approved the provision in a vote of 16 to 11. In the subsequent push for presidential elections, General Wood urged the military government to support the candidacy of Tomás Estrada Palma (former head of the Cuban Revolutionary Party’s junta in New York, Martí’s right-hand man, and a U.S. citizen who spent decades outside of Cuba) over that of Bartolomé Masó, who, unlike Estrada Palma, had opposed the Platt Amendment. On May 20, 1902, Estrada Palma formally took office and the Cuban flag was finally allowed to fly over Havana.
The Platt Amendment framed much of the disorder that would consume Cuba in subsequent years. After nearly a century of activism in favor of Cuban independence, Cuba’s republic quickly descended into a chaotic spin of political infighting, corruption, political violence, and civil unrest. By the 1905 election season, Cuban politicians were starkly divided between liberals and moderates, with little besides personal allegiances separating the two parties. Moderates (supporters of Estrada Palma) committed blatant fraud to keep liberals out, and liberals in turn rose in revolt. In 1906, partisans on both sides called for U.S. intervention; full-scale military occupation subsequently followed. American forces departed by 1909, with José Miguel Gómez of the Liberal Party winning the presidency. Gómez helped to further Cuban economic growth and stabilize the political system. But there were costs: Growth carried the price of extensive foreign ownership, and political stability came with the institutionalization of an extensive system of sinecures and graft. In 1912, U.S. forces once again briefly entered Cuban territory to protect U.S. property against the “revolt” of members of the rogue Independent Party of Color, quickly suppressed by Cuban forces (see page 29, “How did race relations figure into Cuba’s political development during the prerevolutionary period?”). United States Marines would again enter Cuban territory in 1917 amid political chaos between liberals and conservatives. They remained until 1923, helping to ensure stability and for a time boost conservative leader Mario García Menocal’s increasingly centralized and corrupt rule. Meanwhile, between 1920 and 1921, Cuba’s sugar industry had hit the highs and lows of an enormous boom and bust cycle, remembered as the Dance of the Millions.
Throughout the 1920s, public frustration and fervor grew pervasive among an ever-wider swath of Cubans. Intellectuals, labor activists, veterans of the Wars of Independence, and student movements all grew jaded by the failure of Cuba’s leaders to fulfill the idealism and potential of the independence movement itself. Dependence on the United States was clear and an embarrassment, the Platt Amendment was a humiliating impediment to Cuban sovereignty, and Cuban politics had been characterized by corruption, low-level political violence, and zero-sum rivalries. Several activists founded the first Cuban Communist Party during this period, and many labor leaders applied the principles of anarchism to their activism. For those intellectuals and students not ready to embrace either of these radical ideologies, anti-imperialist (Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua) and nationalist (the Mexican Revolution) movements throughout Latin America still provided a source of inspiration.
Many Cubans looked to the candidacy of Gerardo Machado for president in 1925 with a renewed sense of hope. Though affiliated with the Liberals, Machado ran with a progressive, nationalist platform: end the Platt Amendment, no presidential reelection, university autonomy, a new and more just commercial treaty with the United States, and greater control over corruption. Once in office, Machado won popular approval because of an enormous public works program for improving Havana.
Yet corruption continued, and soon, Machado revealed his authoritarian impulses, restricting the freedom of political parties, repressing labor movements, and securing a series of illegal extensions of his term. Cuba subsequently descended into cycles of sporadic violence as opposition groups mounted across Cuban society, labor activism increased, and the government attempted to maintain its stranglehold on power. The opposition was deeply divided. Some middle-class opponents of Machado actively hoped for a full-scale U.S. intervention. Others, such as the generally liberal-democratic student movement, remained not so much anti-American as anti-intervention. For a time, the Communists too were able to establish an alliance with Machado supporters due to their joint opposition to U.S. intervention. Radical labor activists, meanwhile, fruitlessly pursued social revolution. Violence and vandalism erupted in the countryside, with U.S.-owned plantations an obvious target—ironically, both for those who opposed the threat of U.S. interference and those who sought to provoke it. In 1933, U.S. Ambassador Sumner Welles arrived in Havana to mediate, primarily between the middle-class opposition and the government. In part because the United States had begun to move away from its interventionist policies under the new administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but also because Machado had been a loyal protector of U.S. business interests, Washington resisted greater military intervention. By August, Welles had helped broker a transfer of power. Machado resigned and fled to the Bahamas.
In addition to various restrictions on Cuban sovereignty, the Platt Amendment stipulated that Cuba would “sell or lease” to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations, in order to “enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba.” Thus, shortly after the amendment took effect, Cuba’s first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, signed a treaty granting the United States a lease in perpetuity to a naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the eastern tip of Cuba. Under the terms of the agreement, which was renegotiated in 1934 after the Platt Amendment’s repeal, in order for the lease to end, both parties are required to consent to its termination. Originally designed as a coaling station for the U.S. Navy, the base is now the oldest U.S. naval installation anywhere overseas and the only American base in a country with which the United States does not have diplomatic relations. During the insurrection in the 1950s, money and weapons occasionally filtered out of the base, destined for the revolutionaries. The base remained a source of employment for locals from the area well beyond the 1960s, a handful of whom still receive a monthly pension from the U.S. government.
Since the triumph of the revolution, the Cuban government has argued that the United States’ retention of the base is illegal under the terms of the Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties, which, though drafted after the 1903 and 1934 lease agreements, stipulates that treaties coerced under the threat of force—the Platt Amendment’s right of intervention and FDR’s deployment of warships 30 years later during the Machado upheaval—are illegitimate. Moreover, the treaty and its renewal agreement stipulate that the base is to be used for “coaling and naval purposes only.” The United States has used the base for much more, including for Haitian and Cuban refugees picked up at sea and more recently for detention facilities, torture, and military trials. Since 1959, the Cuban government has refused to cash the $4,000 annual rent check issued by the U.S. Treasury and repeatedly demanded for the base to revert to exclusive Cuban sovereignty.
Shortly after the departure of Machado, Fulgencio Batista, a relatively obscure official in the Cuban Army of humble origins, led what is remembered somewhat misleadingly as the “Sergeants’ Revolt,” a passive and surprisingly swift government takeover in September 1933. Batista’s actions led to the establishment of a provisional revolutionary government under the leadership of Ramón Grau San Martín, a progressive professor of medicine who had supported the anti-Machado student movement and did not come from the traditional political elite. Though brief (100 days), Grau’s first presidency was of seminal importance to later events in Cuban history, as his government implemented a number of dramatic nationalist reforms. His cabinet unilaterally abolished the Platt Amendment, established a minimum wage, granted women the right to vote, established a ministry of labor, and, perhaps most important, passed a law requiring that 50% of employees in agriculture, business, and industry be Cuban citizens (Spaniards and Americans often occupied key posts in business, while Jamaicans and Haitian immigrants were willing to earn cheaper wages than Cubans in agriculture). Yet in the aftermath of the violent and disruptive Machado period, political chaos reigned supreme: The government lacked support, intransigent plantation owners refused to abide by the government’s policies regarding labor rights and wages, and Batista further consolidated his authority over the Cuban armed forces. Antonio Guiteras—veteran of the student movement, well-known radical, associate of Julio Antonio Mella (co-founder of Cuba’s first Communist Party), and minister of the interior under the Grau government—played an important role. In addition to shoring up the government’s support in eastern Cuba (where he had extensive contacts), he also pushed the Grau administration’s limits by backing the efforts of radical labor activists, sometimes affiliated or in alliance with the Communists, then known as the Partido Socialista Popular, or PSP. Deeply disturbed and acting independently of the Grau administration, Batista and the military brass moved to preserve order and protect the security of American-owned properties by clamping down on unrest, violently at times. In the end, Grau faced opposition from all sides—from traditional elites for being too radical, and from radicals like Guiteras for not being radical enough. The government soon collapsed and Batista was allowed to assume de facto control.
Throughout this period, the United States watched affairs in Cuba with great unease. Yet, under the terms of the Good Neighbor Policy, Washington gave up the rationale to resist the abrogation of the Platt Amendment, conceding its repeal in 1934. Moreover, some opponents of the Machado regime had specifically targeted U.S.-owned property in the hopes of provoking American interference. In Washington’s view, Batista was preferable to constant intervention in order to preserve law and order.
But Batista needed civilian legitimacy. With the support of the United States, Carlos Mendieta, a prominent politician who had broken with the Machado government, assumed the office of the presidency. Over the next several years, a succession of governments seemed to return to the old-style political haggling dominant in Cuba prior to 1933. But behind the scenes, Batista maintained order, mediating disputes between political elites and serving as the strong man to guarantee stability against continued unrest. Increasingly, Batista cultivated positive relations with the United States as well, securing favorable trading terms among other benefits. Yet despite his strongman tactics and opposition to the Grau 100-day government, Batista still viewed himself as a reformer bred from the turmoil of 1933. Thus, even as disaffected supporters of the Grau government (including Guiteras) turned further to the left, Batista, ever a chameleon, became more of a Populist. In the late 1930s, he attempted to assume the mantle of reformism, reinstituting Grau’s nationalist labor laws, allowing more open labor organizing, and even working in coalition with the Communist PSP (a marriage borne of convenience and popular front politics, not ideological simpatico). In that spirit of reform, and confident of his political staying power, Batista called for a new Cuban constitution and new elections in 1940. The result was one of Latin America’s most progressive constitutions at the time, representing a true, if cumbersome, attempt to construct social democracy, in which the state was charged with ensuring social welfare and an expansive range of rights. Batista emerged victorious in the 1940 elections and, despite his continuing and increasingly strong political accommodation with the Communists (among those leftists who had so strongly resisted the United States during the Machado years), forged deeper economic and security ties with an ideologically pragmatic Washington as the United States entered World War II. Cuba’s economy boomed as a result of war-related demand and the United States used Cuban territory, including the Guantánamo base, for a host of war-related activities (airfields, supply stations, etc). A number of Cuban military personnel also trained in the United States and contributed to the war effort on the front lines. With the upcoming 1944 elections, Batista planned to turn over power, stepping aside to watch the social democracy he had helped construct out of the turmoil of 1933 continue on.
Ramón Grau San Martín returned to the presidency under the banner of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (recycling the name of Martí’s independence-era political organization), popularly known as the Auténticos. As a respected nationalist leader, Grau raised popular expectations for bold reforms. In the aftermath of World War II, Cuba’s sugar economy boomed. Yet Grau’s second presidency was a grave disappointment, as public sector corruption returned in a way not seen since the 1920s. Opposition soon grew in the form of the Ortodoxo Party, founded in 1947 under the leadership of charismatic former student activist and frenetic nationalist Eduardo Chibás. A young lawyer, Fidel Castro, would soon become an active participant in Ortodoxo affairs. Meanwhile, despite the repeal of the Platt Amendment, the United States remained highly influential in Cuban domestic affairs, given the extent of its own economic interests in the country and the all-important leverage of its sugar quota. By middecade, U.S. capital controlled over 40% of the Cuban sugar industry, 23% of all nonsugar industry, 90% of all telephone and electric services, and 50% of Cuba’s railway services (which were heavily utilized by the sugar industry). Havana, long a tourist destination for Americans, experienced a boom in the sex and gambling industries, both of which were promoted by the American mob as well as Cuban locals.
In 1948, the Auténticos were once again elected to power, with Carlos Prío Socarrás taking the presidency. A well-known former student leader, Prío had been in charge of several ministries under Grau, but forced Grau out on corruption charges once he assumed power. Still, corruption worsened and political infighting deepened. The University of Havana had become the center of outright political gangsterism. Chibás’s weekly radio tirades against the improprieties and corruption of the Auténticos reached a new fever pitch and gained more acolytes for the Ortodoxo cause. During the summer of 1951, however, Chibás shot and killed himself on the air, in an apparent radio publicity stunt gone wrong. The result was even more political upheaval.
With the elections of 1952 approaching, the strength of the Ortodoxos worried both Cuban conservatives and the ever-influential United States. Batista entered the field as well, having remained an imposing figure in Cuban politics from a seat in the Senate, which he assumed in 1948. Behind the scenes, Batista and other conspirators in the military were convinced that the nation was descending into political and economic chaos once again. In early March 1952, with Batista’s own chance at victory slim in the elections three months down the line, the military launched a coup. Constitutional rule in Cuba thus ended. For all the faults of this period—the extensive corruption and political infighting, the gangsterism and street violence, not to mention the general inefficiency of government as a result of these practices—the years between 1940 and 1952 had nonetheless been a time of relatively open political competition and considerable, though not unlimited, freedom of expression. Incapable of resisting what at the time appeared to be a more or less unified and U.S.-backed military under Batista, Prío’s government collapsed and he fled to Miami. Passivity and shock characterized the initial response of the Cuban body politic to the coup.
Among a new generation of revolutionaries, the 1952 coup crystallized the view that brittle democratic institutions, polarization, and corruption had made the path of electoral politics a dead end. Among these was Fidel Castro. A trained lawyer and follower of Chibás, Castro planned to run for congress on the Ortodoxo ticket. But Fidel had also already acquired a taste for experimentation. His first revolutionary venture took place in 1947, when he became involved in an effort to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic led by the Caribbean Legion (a Pan-American coalition of leftists who sought to overthrow Latin American dictators). At the last minute, he reconsidered his plan to participate, leaving the expeditionary ship and returning to Cuba. The following year in Bogotá, Colombia, Fidel strengthened his revolutionary resume, joining a riot started in response to the assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whose platform had been based on land reform, workers’ rights, and the rights of the country’s peasants. During the uproar, he helped take over a police station, seized its weapons, and attempted (with little success) to rally government soldiers around the cause of the protestors and the fallen leader. Experiences like these helped fuel not only Castro but an entire generation of activists disillusioned with Cuba’s status quo. Their inspirations and influences varied. Moved by the examples of the French, American, and Mexican revolutions, as well as Cuba’s own independence struggle, many saw themselves as part of the Latin American antidictatorial zeitgeist of the era. They had studied the texts and histories of anarchism and communism, and along with many Cuban professionals and intellectuals, saw FDR’s New Deal as a model for the kind of social contract their society needed to build modern institutions of capitalism and democracy.
The path of armed insurrection began on July 26, 1953, when Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and 135 other conspirators staged an attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern side of the island. Their plan was to seize Moncada’s weapons and take up arms against Batista. The attack was an unmitigated disaster. Sixty-one participants were killed in action, and of the remaining fighters, over half were captured and/or executed. A small contingent, including the Castro brothers and Juan Almeida (an Afro-Cuban from Havana), managed to escape into the surrounding areas but was soon apprehended and arrested. At his trial, Fidel delivered a speech that would define his view of bringing social justice and a new political order, free of corruption, to Cuba. The suicidal and spectacular nature of the Moncada attack, the power of the speech, and its concluding words, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me,” put Fidel Castro on Cuba’s national political map. Castro and the others were sentenced to varying prison terms (from 7 months to 15 years for Fidel). But by 1955, an amnesty campaign carried out by colleagues, mothers of the prisoners, and supporters of what became the 26th of July Movement successfully pressured Batista to release them. A general amnesty was granted for all political prisoners at the time, including those from the Moncada attack. Soon thereafter, Fidel and Raul fled to Mexico, where in exile they plotted, trained, and recruited supporters for their return to Cuba.
In November 1956, Fidel and 80 men, including the 28-year-old doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara, landed their small boat, the Granma, on Playa Los Colorados, in what is now Granma province, also on the east of the island. As with the Moncada attack, Fidel lost most of his men. The biblically resonant 12 survivors made their way into the Sierra Maestra, where they began their insurgency against Batista. In the 22 months between November 1956 and December 31, 1958, when Batista fled Havana, Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement came to dominate the anti-Batista movement on the island, both politically and militarily. But success did not come easily.
In addition to facing shortages of resources and personnel, the 26th of July was not the only game in town. In the wake of Batista’s coup, an assortment of revolutionary groups had emerged to challenge the regime, some with more extensive political support and social networks than others. Among the most important was the University of Havana’s longstanding student revolutionary group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, and its leader José Antonio Echeverría. Echeverría had visited Castro in Mexico City, and between their two organizations there was considerable overlap among the rank and file. But the Directorio’s strategy for overthrowing Batista was even more suicidal than the Moncada attacks. In March 1957, joined by another clandestine group associated with Carlos Prío, the Organización Auténtica (OA), the Directorio staged an attack on the presidential palace in Havana in an effort to assassinate Batista and thus bring down his regime. Most of the individuals involved in the palace attack were killed, including Echeverría. In the aftermath, with assistance from the FBI, Batista’s repressive forces blanketed Havana with a dragnet of informants, police, and security agents who mopped up most of the Directorio’s network. Survivors fled to exile, joined the 26th of July in the Sierra Maestra, and took up arms in the Sierra del Escambray mountain range in the center of the country.
In Oriente province and its capital Santiago de Cuba, another important organization emerged around the leadership of Frank País: Revolutionary National Action. A 22-year-old Baptist school teacher, País had begun to lay down a clandestine network of activists (including some members of the Communist Party’s Youth wing) in several cities and towns in Oriente, aimed at carrying out acts of sabotage against the regime. Although País did not visit Fidel during his Mexico City exile, the two corresponded through direct and indirect means. As a result, País agreed to coordinate a series of acts of political violence to coincide with the Granma’s landing. The coordination was wildly insufficient to provide enough cover for the Granma forces to flee to the mountains, as intended. But País rapidly took up the mantle of the 26th of July and until his murder at point blank by a Santiago police officer in July of 1957, he was the most important figure responsible for keeping Fidel’s new “Rebel Army,” the sierra, supplied with weapons, men, food, money, publicity, and political outreach.
País and his clandestine network, which came to be known as the urban underground, or the llano, were much more than a material rear guard for Fidel. Until the last six to eight months of the insurgency, the lion’s share of decisions regarding tactics, strategy, resource allocation, and ties with other opposition groups, Cuban exiles, and the United States was made by País, his colleagues, and successors—Armando Hart, Faustino Pérez, Haydée Santamaría—not Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, or his brother Raul. The balance of power shifted when a general strike in 1958, organized largely by the llano, failed. Still, contrary to the revolution’s own mythology, which claims victory largely at the hands of the sierra, had it not been for the work of the 26th of July Movement outside of the Sierra Maestra during the first 17 months of the insurgency, the final period, when the anti-dictatorial struggle gained unstoppable military and political momentum, would simply not have been possible.
Seeing the Cuban Revolution as much more than the work of a handful of bearded rebels isolated in the mountains with their peasant supporters is critical to understanding how much popular and broad-based support Castro’s army possessed when it triumphed on January 1, 1959. Although the military defeat of Batista’s army was essential to the regime’s collapse, the insurrection also involved a political campaign by the 26th of July movement to establish itself as the leader of a political coalition of armed and nonviolent groups also seeking to overthrow Batista. Although core forces never exceeded more than 200 men under arms for much of the war, the rebel army’s military prowess debilitated Batista politically, psychologically, and militarily. Its successes also demonstrated to the other competitors for the presidential palace that Fidel and the 26th of July would likely dominate any post-Batista arrangement. Over time, for the 26th of July’s military commanders, soldiers, and rank and file, the guerrilla foco came to be cast as the formative experience of the revolutionary, the womb that gestated the “new Cuban man,” that near-superhuman individual, free of material wants and bourgeois false consciousness, whom Che Guevara would mythologize and attempt to reproduce throughout Cuban society.
A number of young U.S. citizens also participated in the insurgency, whether taking up arms in the Sierra Maestra and Sierra Cristal, participating in a short-lived guerrilla front in Pinar del Río, or serving as gun runners flying weapons in from New York and Miami for the underground’s general strike. One in particular, an ex-Marine by the name of Frank Fiorini, also known by the 26th of July cadre as “Garcia,” came to be viewed as a key figure in destroying the strike’s chances by pushing for a hard-core militarist approach while also failing to actually deliver most of the weapons the rebels paid him to procure. Fiorini’s ties in the United States seemed to extend beyond arms networks. Upon returning from Miami to Havana, he passed a message to the rebels from unnamed individuals said to be laying the groundwork for Vice President Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. At the time (July of 1958), Raul Castro was holding 42 Americans and Canadians hostage and negotiating for their release with the U.S. consulate in Santiago. Nixon’s messengers offered to provide the 26th of July with weapons in exchange for a hostage release deal that would allow Nixon to take credit for securing their release. (Fiorini, whom Cuban intelligence came to believe had been working as an American agent during the insurrection, later worked with the CIA to overthrow Castro, and was involved in assassination plots against him. When Nixon finally became president, Nixon employed Fiorini more directly: Fiorini/Garcia was the same Frank Sturgis who staged the Watergate burglary that would destroy Nixon’s presidency.)
Beyond the sociological and tactical importance of military action, the 26th of July deployed a number of nonmilitary resources to survive and ultimately prevail over Batista and the other contenders for power. To circumvent press censorship at home, the revolutionaries cultivated, and manipulated, the U.S. and international media around their cause. They started their own underground press (no e-mail, blogs, or YouTube for their generation) and a radio broadcast, Radio Rebelde, that helped penetrate the censors and amplify the movement’s reach and image. To make their case against Batista and ease anxieties about their radicalism, 26th of July leaders and their more buttoned-up supporters among Cuba’s professional class actively cultivated the sympathies of members of the U.S. Congress, State Department officials (including staff at the U.S. embassy in Havana and consulate in Santiago), military personnel at Guantánamo, U.N. officials, and important political players in foreign capitals. Fidel himself, and later his supporters, built extensive networks for funds and weapons among Cuban exiles in Miami, Tampa, Chicago, New York, California, Madrid, and Caracas. Beyond the Cuban diaspora, artists and writers performed to raise money for their movement, including the cellist Pablo Casals.
Cuban political history had taught Castro and the 26th of July both the treachery and necessity of big-tent coalition politics. “National unity” became the buzzword for the revolutionaries, but what they really meant was hegemony over the other groups. Competitors sought early in the insurrection to rope the movement into joining a government in exile, and some of Castro’s deputies flirted with the idea for the purpose of gaining money and arms. Yet Fidel, Che, and Raul gambled early in the insurrection that their ultimate path to success lay in delaying any such formal structures until they had gained strength on the ground. The resulting tensions between military and civilian players on Cuba’s political stage (both in Cuba and in exile), within the 26th of July, and between Castro and other insurgent groups remained essentially unresolved when the revolution triumphed on January 1, 1959.
Likewise, and related to their core conviction to end politics—or politiquería—as usual, there was no consensus among the revolutionaries about how they would relate to the U.S. government. Much has been made about one line in a letter Fidel wrote in 1957 casting his ultimate destiny as that of defeating the American Goliath. Likewise, Raul Castro’s kidnapping of 42 American and Canadian employees of the Moa nickel mine in eastern Cuba in order to force a halt in Batista’s bombing of the Sierra has been interpreted as a gesture pulsing with anti-American gall. But many of Cuba’s leading revolutionaries had been educated at American universities; grew up on Hemingway, Cab Calloway, Ivory soap, and Coca Cola; and did not yet imagine, as the outsider Che Guevara may well have, a Cuban future without the United States. Like many Latin Americans, they viewed the United States with a mix of admiration and resentment. That Batista’s brutality against his political and militant challengers had been made possible by weapons, political support, and military and police training from the United States was a central part of the movement’s public relations campaign in the United States. Because of their own ties with progressive flag officers in the military, Fidel and the others anticipated U.S. attempts to replace Batista with more benign military officers as part of last-ditch third-force options. The revolutionaries also saw the United States as part and parcel of Cuba’s institutional deficits, distorted political culture, and economic dependence. Yet when the revolution triumphed, although there was perhaps a desire to challenge the economic status quo and address the issue of dependence, completely extirpating the United States from Cuba was not an explicit, nor really even implicit, part of the 26th of July’s goals.
Indeed, Castro’s movement generally invoked the rhetoric of social justice, clean government, and independence. At the time, “revolution” did not automatically equal communism. The triumphant rebel leaders expressed their objectives vaguely and in a way that would garner the broadest appeal possible. Thus, once Batista was out of the picture, expectations of what the revolution would become were bound to be confounded.
Batista’s departure to exile amid overwhelming rebel support on New Year’s Eve of 1958 marked the end of nearly 25 years on the political stage. Over the course of his career, several different Batistas had emerged. First was a young officer, caught in the throws of political turmoil during the 1930s. Second was the Populist leader who during the late 1930s and early 1940s ushered in a social democracy and permitted space for left-wing, including Communist, activists—all consistent with international politics in the era of the Great Depression and the Popular Front during World War II. Finally, as the Cold War hardened to a freeze in the early 1950s, Batista emerged as an anti-Communist strongman, in the same vein as many other Latin American dictators at the time. Above all, he was a survivor and a political animal, one who had helped construct Cuba’s liberal 1940 order and helped destroy it 12 years later.
It is hard to imagine a more masculine image of revolution than the ubiquitous photos disseminated to the world in early 1959 of the victorious barbudos: the rebels with beards, arms in hand, filthy, exhausted, but euphoric in their victory—a man’s victory. But behind the macho bravado that captured Cuba and the world’s attention were a host of extraordinarily brave and talented women who made survival and success possible. Many had been colleagues of Fidel in the early years of the Ortodoxo party. Others had been followers of Rafael García Barcena, a University of Havana professor who led a short-lived anti-Batista conspiracy in 1953. They came from Cuba’s aristocracy, from its professional classes, and from its working class. Some were educated in the United States and had traveled in Europe. They and their male comrades consciously took advantage of the flexibility their gender afforded them. In the most obvious example, Cuban women transported weapons from one end of the island to the other by sewing them into the pleats of their hoop skirts. But transporting the weapons was the least of their involvement. They raised vast sums of money, whether selling bonds, coercing taxes from landowners, or prevailing upon high-value donors and wealthy politicians in the country clubs of Havana, Cienfuegos, Santiago, or Miami. They also ran clandestine cells that carried out acts of violent sabotage. Most prominent among the female partisans of the 26th of July was Celia Sánchez, a doctor’s daughter from the city of Santiago de Cuba, Oriente province’s capital. Sánchez emerged as Fidel’s closest confidant, his chief of staff, his administrative aide, his accountant, and the revolution’s chief document collector. Another riveting figure was Haydée Santamaría, known as Yeyé. Raised in a sugar mill town, her brother Abel had been tortured and killed after the Moncada attacks, and her husband, Armando Hart (who replaced Frank País after his assassination as chief of the urban underground), spent most of the insurrection in prison. Yeyé had a knack for convincing Cuba’s leading opposition figures, whether exiled in Miami or Caracas, to support the 26th of July. After the urban underground’s debilitating failure to carry out a general strike in 1958, Fidel sent her to Miami to rebuild the political, financial, and material support the movement had lost as a result of the disastrous strike. Her personal interventions with deposed but financially endowed President Carlos Prío succeeded in securing for the Rebel Army a new injection of money and weapons. She well understood the balancing act of preserving the 26th of July’s independence while advocating unity among all of the opposition groups and was able to calibrate and leverage her negotiations to the Rebel Army’s own battleground successes, especially in the second half of 1958. Vilma Espín, the daughter of the Bacardi rum company’s chief counsel, was Frank País’s top deputy in the city of Santiago’s clandestine network. After his assassination put her own life at risk, she joined the Second Front of the Sierra Cristal, commanded by Raul Castro, who became her fiancé during the war.
The letters and images of these women reveal that they were conscious of their ambiguous positions within the revolution. Some photographs show them smoking in fatigues and berets, evoking the bravado of the hard-boiled, though well-kept fighters that they were. Others, taken after 1959, show them dressed to the nines in lipstick and pearls, donning the latest fashions. In the Cuba of the 1950s, none would have described themselves as “feminist.” And while the men whose work they made possible harbored a deep appreciation for their talents, it would take 15 years for the first woman to become a member of the Politburo. Still, many of the revolution’s leading women went on to create and lead institutions designed to bring a degree of dignity to Cuban women, whether through literacy programs and job training or to preserve, in the increasingly orthodox institutions of the radicalizing revolution, some space for Cuban arts and culture.
With the advent of the PRC, José Martí and other independence leaders explicitly tied Cuba’s struggle for independence to the creation of a new raceless nationality, “with all and for the good of all.” “A Cuban is more than mulatto, black, or white,” Martí had written in 1893, and so it was within the liberation army, with Afro-Cubans of varying backgrounds participating actively and, theoretically, on equal terms with their white counterparts. In an era where Darwin and the precursors of eugenics were en vogue among biologists, Europeans, and U.S. politicians alike, the Cuban independence movement’s strong ideology of “antiracism”—coupled with the leadership of Afro-Cuban heroes like Antonio Maceo—stood in sharp contrast to dominant international attitudes at the time. Yet as with much in Cuba’s history, practical realities failed to live up to lofty ideals. Internationally and domestically, qualms regarding black mobilization persisted, and comparisons to Haiti’s “black republic” were ubiquitous, sowing fears during and after the war that Cuba was not fit for self-government. To counter such perceptions, especially in the wake of the Platt Amendment and the U.S. occupation, partisans of the independence struggle and other politicians endeavored to promote a “whiter” or “more civilized” face of their movement through its largely Spanish-descendant leadership. But just as often, such biases and racial anxieties were shared by those leaders of the Cuban nationalist collation purportedly charged with upholding Martí’s ideals.
The result of such lingering tensions was a pattern of race relations throughout the republican period characterized by paradox and unfulfilled expectations. Universal male suffrage was guaranteed in 1901, making Afro-Cubans active political agents and targets of politicians seeking votes (women of any race would not gain the right to vote until 1934). Afro-Cuban cultural societies and institutions were as embedded in networks of patronage and corruption as other sectors of society. Likewise, a number of Afro-Cuban or mulatto politicians gained prominence in the early years of the republic, such as Juan Gualberto Gómez and Martín Morua Delgado, both veterans of the abolitionist and independence struggles. By the early 1920s, Afro-Cuban dance and music forms like rumba and son were increasingly seen as symbols of Cuban nationality, inspiring varied interpretations and appropriations by elite intellectuals in a sustained afrocubanismo art craze. Afro-Cuban artists like singer Benny Moré and poet Nicolás Guillén became national stars. Indeed, the imposing figure and political career of Fulgencio Batista, himself a mulatto, lent some credence to the notion that Martí’s antiracism had not gone totally unheeded in a society that was, after all, more integrated and intermixed racially than its neighbor to the north.
Yet just as Batista’s mulatto heritage was a repeated point of suspicion and derision for some of his opponents, Afro-Cubans contended with prejudice, inequality, and even violence throughout the republican period. In many corners of elite society, Martí’s writings on race came to be interpreted as a call for racial fraternity rather than equality, a suggestion that carried a strong grain of paternalism. Indeed, a number of well-known Cuban independence leaders argued early in the century that Afro-Cubans owed white Cubans a debt for having sacrificed themselves in pursuit of abolition. Following this logic of fraternity (embraced by not only whites but also some moderate well-to-do Afro-Cubans), any attempt by Afro-Cubans to address grievances by organizing politically along racial lines was seen not only as a threat to the political order but also as, ironically, racist. The consequences of such thinking turned deadly in 1912 when none other than Martín Morua Delgado, the moderate mulatto politician, sponsored a law banning the existence of the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC)—a fringe political party founded by Afro-Cuban veterans disillusioned by continued discrimination and poor economic opportunities. The PIC revolted in response, and was brutally suppressed.
Entrenched racial anxieties appeared in a number of other arenas as well. Over a number of years, politicians used immigration policies to specifically attempt to “whiten” the population, viewing Spanish migrants as more industrious than Afro-Cuban descendants of slaves. Public opposition to the importation of cheap labor from Haiti and the Antilles by U.S.-owned enterprises, while a focal point of Cuban nationalism and early anti-imperialism, also carried strong racial overtones. Likewise, early artwork ostensibly celebrating Afro-Cuban culture tended to carry its own sense of paternalism, as well as an exoticizing impulse. Eugenics and other pseudo-scientific approaches justifying racist preconceptions of Afro-Cubans’ supposedly lesser intelligence and predilections toward depravity made significant inroads among the Cuban intelligentsia, including in the work of renowned anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, remembered more often for his later works celebrating Afro-Cuban culture than his earlier tracts denouncing Santería and other syncretic practices as “witchcraft.”
At the day-to-day level, racial borders in Cuba were certainly more fluid than in the United States. Yet Afro-Cubans nonetheless faced innumerable instances of discrimination, both overt and concealed. While nothing compared to the breadth of Jim Crow legislation existed on the island, struggles for access to institutions, facilities, and spaces were a consistent component of Afro-Cubans’ quest for fairer treatment. At elite clubs and institutions, the presence of Afro-Cubans was generally proscribed, whether explicitly or through tacit understandings. Thus, even as some Afro-Cubans rose to national prominence and were celebrated by a broad array of citizens (such as well-known musician Bola de Nieve or the boxer “Kid Chocolate” in the 1930s), they were at times denied access to hotels and exclusive restaurants. Likewise, access to jobs across various sectors of the labor market was decidedly more difficult, though not always impossible, for Afro-Cubans—often because of near-constant competition from white immigrants. Where racial prerequisites were officially banned, employers found more indirect ways, such as the dubious qualification of “good appearance,” to exclude Afro-Cubans. Labor movements generally welcomed all workers, especially radical unions close to Communists and other leftists. But within their ranks, Afro-Cubans seeking leadership roles occasionally faced an uphill battle against persistent prejudice. Finally, while public schools in Cuba were never segregated, private institutions that acted as feeders into Cuba’s elite, frequently run by North Americans, often were.
Interestingly, at the height of civil unrest in the late 1950s, few if any organized Afro-Cuban institutions publicly denounced the Batista regime. In fact, supporters of Batista’s government attempted to portray the revolutionaries as antiblack. This does not mean, however, that Afro-Cubans were necessarily less likely than others to support the revolution, as is often thought. Still, the issue of race was not a particularly prominent part of the political program promoted by either the 26th of July movement or any of the other revolutionary groups active at the time. During and after the insurrection, a number of well-known Afro-Cuban figures sympathetic to the Castros urged the new government in public and in private to make discrimination an important social issue under the revolution. By March of 1959, it was clear that the subject would receive pronounced and sustained attention from the new government.
Just as American politics and economic power exercised an undue degree of influence over Cuban society before 1959, so too did U.S. culture make its presence felt across the island, in myriad ways. From boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Coca-Cola to New York fashions and Ford automobiles, not to mention the ever-growing presence of American tourists, consumer culture for much of Cuba’s republican period boasted a decidedly American imprint. In many ways and for many years, the presence of such a significant repertoire of Americana across the island not only was a symptom of the island’s political and economic dependence on the North but also subtly reinforced this state of affairs through the power of cultural messaging. How could a youngster enraptured by Hollywood blockbusters of the day not idealize the United States—the land of movie stars, macho cowboy heroes, and victorious soldiers who defeated the Nazis? Likewise, American products were associated and marketed as indicators of modernity and social advancement. United States influences could be more explicitly malicious as well, as in the terrain of race relations, where early years of U.S. occupation provided fuel for racist attitudes toward Afro-Cubans (as well as the creation of the Ku Klux Klan Kubano, or KKKK).
Yet despite the power and reach of U.S. cultural influence on the island, the relationship between U.S. and Cuban culture was not simply one of unilateral domination. In some respects, it was precisely the unfulfilled aspirations for material well-being, efficiency, and progress unleashed by the North American consumption ethic that fed popular support for the revolutionary struggle in the 1950s, ironically contributing to a growing nationalist and vaguely anti-American impulse. But Cuban culture was not exclusively defined by its ties to the North. Spanish and African (as well as more broadly European) influences—whether in literature, art, food, music, religion, or language—remained vital as well, contributing to what Fernando Ortiz called a rich ajiaco, or stew, of hybrid practices. Cubans often “Cubanized” U.S. pastimes and products, turning them into something their own, something that most Americans might not even recognize. For example, while baseball became by far the most popular sport on the island, Cubans developed their own distinctive style and traditions surrounding the game.
Cuban culture also profoundly influenced aspects of American culture, despite being seemingly outmatched in size or reach. This was most apparent in the arena of music. Just as American jazz left an enduring mark on Cuban music, inspiring the emergence of big-band mambo in the 1950s, for example, Cuban rumba, mambo, and cha-cha-cha shaped everything from U.S. commercial kitsch (Perry Como’s 1954 hit “Papa Loves Mambo” comes to mind) to avant-garde “Cu-bop” jazz pioneered by Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Kenton. Cuban band leaders like Pérez Prado and Xavier Cugat toured the United States extensively, driving dance crazes across the country. Less known is that a Cuban baseball player of likely mulatto descent played in the Major Leagues well before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier for African Americans.
In these ways, prior to 1959, Cuban and American culture were deeply intertwined with one another, if not always in equal proportions. Many aspects of these linkages would be attacked in the postrevolutionary period as vestiges of Cuba’s neocolonial dependence on the North. Yet even in a context of polarized nationalism and economic isolation at the hands of the United States, cultural ties between the two countries would prove impossible to break entirely.