From Above or From Below?
What was the nature of Cuba’s internal situation as the country’s relationship with the United States was rapidly changing in the late 1950s and early 1960s? How was the transition from an antidictatorial political movement to a far more radical project possible, and why did it occur at that particular point in time?
In contrast to those analyses that portray the Cuban leaders as merely reacting to U.S. policies and actions, I maintain that these leaders were actors greatly influenced by their own political predispositions and ideological inclinations. The minds of the Cuban leaders were made up not primarily as a result of U.S. Cuban policies in the late 1950s and beginning of the 1960s but rather as a reaction to earlier U.S. policies in Cuba and elsewhere. The events leading up to the U.S.-supported military takeover in Guatemala in 1954 had a big impact; even more important was, of course, U.S. foreign policy related to Cuba in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This is not to deny that U.S. policy at the time of the revolution played a significant role, but these actions must be placed in their appropriate political and historical context. Thus, it may well be that U.S. policy in this period was not very important in forming the mind-set of the more radical elements of the Cuban leadership, whether pro-Soviet or not. Instead, U.S. policy may have provided further evidence confirming what these radicals already knew or expected about the United States. Many revolutionary leaders were aware of the systemic policy limitations and constraints imposed by imperial capitalism. That does not mean that the revolutionary leaders may not have misunderstood or miscalculated the extent of U.S. power—for example, assuming that the United States could not easily dispense with the purchase of Cuban sugar. Perhaps the most important effect of U.S. Cuban policy was to undermine and diminish the influence of the significant although not decisive pro-U.S. liberal elements in the Cuban revolutionary government in 1959 and to radicalize the great majority of the population.
The transition from political to social revolution that began with Fulgencio Batista’s overthrow on January 1, 1959, brought about a social and political project that was fundamentally incompatible with the interests of the United States and of Cuba’s propertied classes. It is thus not surprising that a radicalizing process of measures and countermeasures between the United States and Cuba came into play. However, this process should not be assumed to be identical to the related but different idea that the objective obstacles encountered by the revolutionary leaders rather than their politics constituted the primary factors in the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution. Morris H. Morley communicated this idea in his study of U.S.-Cuban relations, arguing that “any attempt at economic transformation when U.S. companies dominated Cuba was bound to engender conflict, and it was the incapacity of political revolutionaries to institute partial changes in the face of internal and external opposition that led to a major confrontation with the United States and eventual nationalization of all alien enterprises.”1 But Morley seems to ignore the fact that when confronted with the undoubtedly great costs and pressures of pursuing a radical revolutionary course, the leadership might have stepped back and retreated, a phenomenon historically more common than revolutionaries staying the course. Admitting that such a choice might have been possible is independent of whether one approves of a particular course of action. Most important, Morley ignores the issue of whether the leaders’ unwillingness far more than their incapacity to step back from a radical program led to the revolution’s eventual outcome.
To be sure, costs accrued no matter which road the revolutionary leadership chose. One obvious cost of taking a more reformist route would have been a significantly reduced scope for the revolutionary process and the obvious danger of Cuba suffering a fate similar to that of the Bolivian Revolution. Another cost might have been a split among the leaders had Fidel Castro called for a retreat, although it is fairly certain that he would have emerged victorious had any such split taken place. Some observers have claimed that mass pressures from below played a critical role in determining the course eventually followed by the revolutionary leadership. This is an ambiguous contention, however. It is one thing if the concept of pressure is taken to refer to the strongly rising expectations of a higher standard of living among the Cuban people in 1959 and 1960, but it is quite a different matter to talk about pressure to suggest that the great majority of the Cuban people were pressuring the government from the left—that is, that popular impatience, distrust, or discontent arose with the government’s pace of reform. In this sense, the claim that mass pressures from below, particularly during 1959 and early 1960, left Castro no other option but to stay the radical revolutionary course is not credible.2 At that time, the government’s redistribution policies and other widely popular measures that fell far short of Communism had created a great deal of credibility and huge political capital for the revolutionary government, aside from the fact that the great majority of the population had not yet experienced the impact of shortages and rationing. By any comparative standard—the Cuban Revolution of 1933 or the Mexican, Russian, or Chinese Revolutions—remarkably little rural or urban turmoil occurred in Cuba in 1959–60.
These sorts of splits among revolutionary leaders have been a common phenomenon in revolutionary regimes in the Third World (e.g., Algeria and Kenya). In fact, as we saw in chapter 2, evidence suggests strains within the Cuban revolutionary leadership—specifically, between Fidel Castro on one side and Raúl Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara on the other—in the spring and early summer of 1959.3 This finding points to an understudied aspect of the Cuban revolutionary process: the existence of a number of political currents within the revolutionary regime, at least during its first years in power. In addition to the aforementioned liberals, who were out of the Cuban revolutionary government by the end of 1959, a number of independent and non-Communist radicals existed (David Salvador, Marcelo Fernández, Faustino Pérez, Carlos Franqui, and Enrique Oltuski).4 A powerful pro-Communist and pro-Soviet wing also existed (Raúl Castro, Che Guevara) and was organizationally independent of the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP, the old pro-Soviet Cuban Communist Party).
The existence of these ideological tendencies within the revolutionary government reinforces the proposition that the revolutionary leaders were not merely reacting to U.S. policies but had social and political ideas that they were determined to carry out in practice. As previously suggested, the masses of revolutionary followers were more affected and radicalized by the U.S. opposition to the policies of the revolution. By the time they came to power, the principal revolutionary leaders (except for the liberals, who had relatively little influence and power) were already ideologically committed to something more than the traditional type of Latin American reform program. Of course, this ideological commitment would not by itself have been sufficient unless these leaders had also found opportunities beyond their greatest expectations. This is exactly what happened: the traditional Cuban army collapsed, taking with it the main support for the Cuban prerevolutionary state structure.
Fidel Castro’s leadership made a major difference in the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The Batista dictatorship, already in an advanced state of decomposition, would have collapsed sooner or later, even if Castro had died in battle in, say, late 1958. But Castro’s skillful political intervention helped to prevent a military coup that might have at least delayed the disintegration of Batista’s army. Castro’s political leadership made an even greater difference in determining the course taken by the Cuban Revolution after it came to power.
Castro’s role was made possible by the particular social context of the Cuba of the late 1950s. As we saw in chapter 1, prior to the revolution, Cuba was among Latin America’s most economically advanced countries, with significant capitalist, middle, and working classes. Yet these classes became politically weaker after the Revolution of 1933, from which the Cuban capitalist class emerged with a significantly diminished hegemony, at least in a political sense.5 A group of mutinous sergeants replaced the traditional officer class rooted in the higher circles of Cuban society, thereby considerably weakening the organic tie between the armed forces and the upper classes, while the latter continued to view the U.S. government as their political guarantor of last resort. The substantial working class was highly organized in trade unions that, by the 1950s, had become highly bureaucratic and corrupt, thereby making it very difficult for this class to play the significant role in the struggle against Batista that it had played in the struggle against the Machado dictatorship. Also, by the mid-to late 1950s, the weak political parties, including the reform Ortodoxos, that had existed prior to Batista’s seizure of power had fallen apart, reflecting the political weaknesses of all of Cuba’s social classes. In this context, the Movimiento de Resistencia Civica (Movement of Civic Resistance), the anti-Batista organization formed by professional and other primarily middle-class elements, dissolved itself into the 26th of July Movement in February 1959, a symptom of its political subordination to Fidel Castro’s leadership.
This situation was even more conducive to the thriving of Bonapartism in Cuba than was the pre-Batista period. Marx, Engels, and subsequent Marxists developed the concept of Bonapartism to explain the ability of individual political leaders to acquire a considerable degree of power and freedom of action in relation to the ruling and subordinate classes. The ruling classes’ inability to govern on behalf of their interests facilitated the rise of Bonapartism for a number of reasons, including a deadlock among the various social classes.6 The other side of this coin was a revolutionary political leadership that rather than being radical petty bourgeois, as the Cuban Communists claimed at the time, was declassed in the sense that it had no strong organizational or institutional ties either to the petty bourgeoisie or to any of the country’s other major social classes. Other factors also helped to bring about a social revolutionary situation in Cuba: the stagnant economy; the great sense of frustration, failure, and demoralization left by the uncompleted revolution of 1933;7 the betrayals and disappointments produced by the degeneration of most of the revolutionaries of that era into practitioners of a thoroughly corrupt politiquería if not outright gangsterism; the compromise of national sovereignty by the neocolonial relationship with the United States; and the geopolitical fatalism of most traditional Cuban politicians as expressed by the notion that nothing could occur in Cuba without U.S. approval.
By the end of 1958, the rapid development of the armed struggle against the Batista dictatorship had brought about startling results that surprised even the revolutionary leaders. Celia Sánchez, Castro’s confidant and chief of staff, explained that the rebels never expected that they “would be so strong and popular. We thought we would have to form a government with [other opposition parties such as the] Auténticos, Ortodoxos, and so forth. Instead we found that we could be the masters of Cuba.”8 Along the same lines, seventeen months earlier, in August 1957, Armando Hart and Faustino Pérez, national leaders of Castro’s 26th of July Movement, contemplated three possible scenarios after the fall of Batista. As they saw it, the two most likely scenarios were that the movement would either reject or be unable to formally support the new post-Batista government, while the third and least likely scenario was that their movement would be included in the new government. They did not even consider the possibility that a government headed by the 26th of July Movement would come to power.9
In 1957, Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement began to predominate over the various opposition groups and forces that had taken up arms to overthrow Batista’s government. Castro’s eventual success depended in part on the defeats suffered by the other opposition movements. In mid-1956, a coup planned by anti-Batista military officers was uncovered and its leaders sent to prison. In September 1957, a navy rebellion supported by the 26th of July Movement was crushed in the port of Cienfuegos in central Cuba. Those two events almost eliminated the traditional military as a source of rebellion, at least in the near future. The student-based Directorio Revolucionario (Revolutionary Directorate) suffered a severe blow when it failed in its attempt to assassinate Batista when it attacked the Presidential Palace in March 1957. The Auténticos, a traditional political group that had taken up arms against Batista, also suffered irreversible defeats. The army assassinated most of the fighters belonging to former president Carlos Prío’s Organización Auténtica shortly after their boat Corinthia landed on the northern coast of Oriente Province in May 1957.
While these other groups suffered serious if not fatal defeats, Castro’s movement had many more successes than failures. First, the fact that Castro had fulfilled his promise to return, illegally landing in Cuba in 1956, constituted an initial but major step in the process of building his mystique among the Cuban opposition and people at large. As the other groups were suffering serious setbacks, Castro eventually defeated the army in a number of skirmishes and ambushes, some of them at small rural outposts. He thus built a base in the Sierra Maestra to which he successfully recruited several hundred armed men in 1957. Before these successful military encounters, however, the 26th of July Movement had suffered some serious but not crippling defeats, including the failure of the November 30, 1956, Santiago de Cuba uprising and the wiping out of most of the eighty-one men who accompanied Fidel Castro on a landing on the southern coast of Oriente Province in early December 1956. However, the Sierra Maestra stronghold in Oriente Province continued to prosper militarily and even more politically as it emerged as an opposition to the Batista dictatorship. Its political attraction was greatly enhanced with the February 1958 establishment of Radio Rebelde. By telling the truth about rebel victories and defeats, the radio station obtained a reputation for veracity sharply at odds with the fantastic claims made by spokesmen for Batista’s army.
The successes attained by the 26th of July Movement and its Sierra Maestra stronghold enabled the movement to survive its greatest defeat, the long-planned national general strike called with little notice in April 1958. Batista’s repressive apparatus quickly crushed the action, yet the relative stability that the rebels had already created in the Sierra Maestra allowed them to recover from this serious defeat. The rebels soon branched out with the establishment of two other fronts in other mountainous areas in Oriente Province: one front, led by Raúl Castro, was established in the Sierra Cristal in northeastern Oriente Province; the other, led by Juan Almeida, was opened at the other end of the Sierra Maestra, east of the provincial capital of Santiago de Cuba.10
The cumulative effect of the growth of the guerrillas resulted in the ascending hegemony of Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement. The strike’s defeat led to a consolidation of Castro’s internal control of the movement and concomitantly to a far greater political and military role for the Sierra’s mountain guerrillas at the expense of the movement’s urban struggle, which, contrary to myth, accounted for the great majority of the membership and most dangerous activities of the 26th of July Movement.
Castro’s ascending influence became almost invulnerable to challenge after the 26th of July guerrillas defeated a major offensive by Batista’s army in the summer of 1958. By the end of July, the rebel army had beat back Batista’s offensive, winning thirty battles that were more substantial than the skirmishes typical of the 1957 encounters. Radio Rebelde disseminated the news of these victories to Cubans on the island and abroad. By mid-August, Batista’s troops had completely cleared out of the Sierra Maestra.11 The government retreat removed a major obstacle to the rebel army’s eventual conquest of the island. With this, the 26th of July Movement fundamentally succeeded in its long-sought-after goal of obtaining unchallenged hegemony within the opposition to Batista. Although other armed guerrilla groups fought the Batista government, particularly in central Cuba, they were much less significant than Castro’s movement in military as well as political terms.
Two key events took place in the second half of 1958 and beginning of 1959 that made possible the particular kind of social revolution that developed after January 1, 1959. One was the hegemony of Castro’s movement among the opposition to Batista. The other was the total collapse of the Cuban army, the bulwark of the Cuban state. Since the 1933 revolution, the army had severed its organic connection with the Cuban upper classes, becoming a fundamentally mercenary and corrupt institution with no solid social base or ideological and political motivation. When forced to engage in real combat against the rebels, the army fell apart, plagued by desertions and corruption. While the rebel leadership worked hard to prevent a military coup d’état supported by the U.S. embassy when Batista fled the country, the causes of the collapse of the army were rooted in these long-term trends.12 Thus, the defeat of the army was far more a result of its own weaknesses than of the military prowess of the rebel army.
The collapse of the traditional army dramatically altered the relationship of social and political forces in Cuban society and completely removed from the scene a major source of support for opposition to the revolutionary regime from either the imperial United States or the Cuban upper classes at home. A radical transformation if not elimination of the traditional armed forces has been a necessary condition for the development of social revolution in Latin America.
While the collapse of the traditional army removed an important obstacle to revolutionary change, the control achieved by Fidel Castro became a critical element in the development of a revolutionary process in which the revolutionary leadership always retained political initiative and control. Even though the mass of the Cuban population became politicized and radicalized after January 1, 1959, the revolutionary political leadership always stayed ahead in implementing radical policies. They did not do so because popular pressures left the leaders no alternative, as some have argued, but because of the political weakness of the domestic opposition and the leadership’s political purposes and ideas.
A strategic and tactical continuity existed in Fidel Castro’s leadership of the revolutionary movement both before and after Batista’s overthrow. On the one hand, he maintained the political initiative, remaining ahead—but not too far ahead—of mass sentiment; on the other hand, he made temporary ideological and political accommodations to supporters and allies without surrendering the slightest amount of political control. Castro’s many accommodations were never disrupted by pressures, eruptions, or demands from below. Thus, for example, in October 1958, Castro signed a moderate agrarian reform law in the Sierra Maestra mountains. No records indicate that any groups or individuals objected that this was an insufficiently radical measure. Yet although this reform involved political and ideological accommodations to Cuba’s capitalist and upper-middle classes, Castro stood firm with respect to issues of political control. A revealing incident took place in November 1957, when representatives of all opposition forces, including the 26th of July Movement (whom Castro would later claim were unauthorized by him to do so) met in Miami and signed a “Document of Unity of the Cuban Opposition to the Batista Dictatorship.” The Miami Pact included the establishment of a provisional government with the understanding that prominent Cuban economist Felipe Pazos would become the provisional president. Pazos supported Castro and in July 1957 had signed an earlier historic manifesto with Castro and Raúl Chibás (brother of deceased political leader Eduardo Chibás). However, in Miami, Pazos acted as an essentially free political agent: he had not obtained Castro’s approval before accepting the Miami conclave’s designation. In an open letter addressed to the signers of the Miami document, Castro promptly repudiated it.13 In this letter, Castro criticized serious omissions in the Miami document, such as the absence of an explicit rejection of foreign intervention in Cuba and of a military junta as a replacement for Batista. But, most importantly, Castro demanded and won the sole authority to nominate the future president and to keep “public order” after Batista’s overthrow.14
Shortly after the revolutionary triumph, a number of major critical issues came up in a wide variety of areas, including agrarian reform, housing legislation, and the control of trade union and party organizations. The resolution of these issues allowed Castro and his close associates to establish the bases for a social revolution and a class struggle that has all along been closely managed and controlled from the top.15 This management and control allowed the leaders to maneuver aggressively or with caution without risking a challenge to their control. In February 1959, an important episode took place that clearly revealed these strategic and tactical conceptions. At a time when the PSP’s support for and alliance with Castro were tentative and uncertain and the PSP remained to Castro’s left on social and economic questions, elements of this party encouraged several instances of “spontaneous” land seizures. While the Cuban Communists were in no position to seriously challenge Castro, their initiative irritated and provoked him into making some of his strongest anti-Communist remarks of the 1959 period. Castro unambiguously stated his position on the question of land distribution in a televised February 16, 1959, interview: “We are opposed to anarchic land distribution. We have drafted a law that stipulates that [persons involved in] any land distribution that is made without waiting for the new agrarian law will lose their rights to benefits from the new agrarian reform. Those who have appropriated lands from January 1 to the present date have no right to those lands. Any provocation to distribution of lands disregarding the revolutionaries and the agrarian law is criminal.”16
The Communist Party cautiously backtracked on what may have been a political experiment on its part, and a few days after Castro’s speech the party endorsed Castro’s land distribution policy. Thereafter, no significant Cuban political group encouraged spontaneous takeovers or seizures of any kind. Those types of outbreaks characterized virtually all twentieth-century social revolutions; however, in Cuba, particularly after the enactment of the May 1959 agrarian reform law, the government seized land through Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) functionaries and/or rebel army officers. On many occasions, these seizures occurred in response to peasant complaints and requests.
As another means of maintaining personal control of political developments, Fidel Castro discouraged any effort to make the 26th of July Movement into a regular party with an ideology, program, and organization. An independent non-Communist radical, Marcelo Fernández, the national organization coordinator of the 26th of July Movement, proposed precisely such a change in a February 16, 1959, editorial in the movement’s daily, Revolución.17 However, the movement never developed as a serious organized force. Fidel Castro allowed the 26th of July Movement to deteriorate organizationally until it was merged into what eventually became a new and reconstituted Communist Party in the mid-1960s, after virtually all of the fundamental socioeconomic and political changes in Cuba had already been carried out.
What is perhaps uniquely striking about Fidel Castro’s adoption of this mechanism of control from above is that he insisted on it even when he could have obtained his immediate political objectives through the use of democratic means. One instance was the important trade union movement. In November 1959, shortly after Fidel Castro began to make a clear turn toward the Communist countries abroad and the Cuban Communists at home, the first postrevolutionary trade union congress took place. At this congress, the Cuban leader virtually imposed a leadership with a much greater Communist representation than was warranted by the 10 percent of delegates who were members of that party. After the congress concluded, the Labor Ministry, which was of course under Castro’s control, launched a purge of large numbers of trade union leaders who had resisted Communist influence. The purge took place by means of purge commissions and carefully staged and controlled union meetings rather than through elections. About 50 percent of the labor leaders, most of whom belonged to the 26th of July Movement and had been freely elected in the April and May 1959 local and national union elections, were removed, while veteran PSP cadres and their union collaborators took over these leadership positions. Yet as Marifeli Pérez-Stable has pointed out, Castro and his revolutionary government enjoyed such great support in 1960 that the objectionable labor leaders could have easily been removed from office by holding new elections; any slate of candidates supported by Castro and his government would undoubtedly have won.18 However, from the standpoint of the Cuban leader’s long-term perspectives, new elections would have allowed the unions to retain their autonomy instead of becoming mere policy tools in the hands of a government leadership that at this point had begun to move in a political direction toward the Soviet Union and the Cuban Communists.
Yet even during these very decisive fall 1959 days, Castro could be tactically cautious as well. In November 1959, as we shall see in chapter 5, the Soviet government and its informal envoy to Cuba expressed their impatience with Castro’s delays of Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan’s visit to Cuba. The Cuban leader was especially apprehensive about the forthcoming two-day National Catholic Congress in Havana. On November 28, more than a million Cubans gathered to hear Pope John XXIII address the Cuban people over Vatican radio at the opening of the Congress. At that Congress, several priests denounced the Communist threat to Cuba. This open display of Catholic strength restrained Castro and delayed his movement toward the Communist world. Mikoyan’s visit to Havana did not take place until February 4, 1960.19
The supremacy that Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement had achieved by mid-1958 greatly facilitated Castro’s defeat of his actual or potential domestic political opponents after he came to power, most strikingly in the case of the substantial Cuban bourgeoisie and middle classes, which were important for their number as well as for their economic and cultural weight. Cubans of those backgrounds had played important roles in the struggle against Batista: Cuban capitalists had contributed substantial amounts of money to Castro’s 26th of July Movement.20 Middle-class professionals and small businessmen also contributed financially to the movement and participated in revolutionary activities in a number of organizations, including the 26th of July Movement and its allied Movimiento de Resistencia Civica.
The first formal government apparatus established in January 1959 and headed by former provincial judge Manuel Urrutia included important liberal figures from these milieus and collectively constituted the largest group among the cabinet ministers. In a sense, however, these ministers were caught in a bind. They had no real power, which always remained in Castro’s hands. Although personal ambition may have played a role in their assuming their ministerial positions, these liberals were also politically motivated by the idea that they could play a role in moderating the rebel leaders’ radicalism. In fact, however, membership in the cabinet restrained these liberals from openly criticizing the radical measures that Castro, who had officially become prime minister in February 1959, was beginning to put into effect—most notably, the May 1959 agrarian reform law, promulgated while almost all of the liberal ministers remained in office. One of the more conservative of these liberals, Minister of Agriculture Humberto Sorí Marín, had authored the moderate agrarian reform act that had been approved in October 1958. His views were ignored in the drafting of the subsequent agrarian reform law, and he later joined the opposition and was eventually executed.
The cabinet liberals’ inability to publicly criticize the government also meant the loss of whatever political ability they might still retain to mobilize and organize their substantial middle-class base. The lack of middle-class political representation had been considerably aggravated by the collapse of the traditional reform parties—first the Auténticos and then the Ortodoxos—in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As discussed in chapter 3, this represented a major difference between Cuba and Bolivia, where the right wing of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario amply and successfully represented the perspectives of the middle-class sectors of the population. One important consequence of Castro’s supremacy was that it aggravated the absence of channels for the political expression and representation of the Cuban middle classes. By the end of 1959, virtually no liberals remained in the Cuban cabinet—all had been replaced or had left of their own accord. However, this process occurred gradually, rather than as the result of one single blow by Fidel Castro, in itself evidence of Castro’s shrewd use of “salami tactics,” of taking on and defeating one enemy at a time.
The cabinet liberals, potential articulators of the views and interests of major class forces such as the Cuban bourgeoisie and middle classes, were not the only people captured by the political tentacles of Castro’s supremacy. This was also true of a number of other political groups and currents. Such was the case, for example, of the Directorio Revolucionario, a significant student-based group that in 1958 had had a guerrilla movement in central Cuba. After Batista’s overthrow, this group attempted, in an awkward and politically unsophisticated manner, to obtain a slice of power. In early January 1959, group members occupied the Presidential Palace (where they had staged a daring but unsuccessful attack against Batista in March 1957) and stole some weapons from one of the military headquarters. These actions played right into Castro’s hands: he raised the then popular slogan “Weapons for What?” and evoked the specter of the political gangsterism that had plagued Cuba during the 1940s, thus quickly marginalizing the Directorio Revolucionario. The group’s remnants—that is, those who had not broken with the government—eventually merged into the newly formed Communist Party in the mid-1960s. They had neither an organizational nor a political perspective to counterpose to the Maximum Leader.
The primarily middle-class Movimiento de Resistencia Civica, which played important active and support roles in the urban underground and represented the closest organizational embodiment of what today would be called civil society, dissolved itself and merged into the 26th of July Movement in late February 1959. This development was not surprising because the Movimiento de Resistencia Civica had a more affluent and educated social base than the 26th of July Movement but had always functioned as an auxiliary arm of Castro’s movement. The independent revolutionaries within the weakly organized 26th of July Movement (Salvador, Pérez, Oltuski, Fernández, and Franqui), who, in the words of Paco Ignacio Taibo II, constituted a left-wing sector that combined “anti-imperialism with a strong critique of the Communists, who [were] considered to be conservative and sectarian,”21 did not constitute an organized group. At best, they constituted an incipient political current that was also limited by its dependence on Fidel Castro because its members were not well known and were not established political figures in their own right. However, they did for a while enjoy more political influence than the liberals, perhaps because the politics of these independent radicals overlapped with Castro’s political stance early in the revolution and in particular with Castro’s early maintenance of a political distance from the PSP. Franqui served as the editor of Revolución, the official newspaper of the 26th of July Movement and a paper that openly polemicized with the Communists until September 1959. Revolución also sponsored one of the most interesting and independent left-wing literary supplements in Latin America, the weekly Lunes de Revolución, which the government suppressed in 1961. As head of the Cuban trade unions, David Salvador had fought the Communists for control of the union movement. He also attracted public attention in the United States and Latin America in March 1959, when he publicly interrupted a speech by liberal Costa Rican leader José Figueres and strongly criticized his pro-U.S. Cold War stand. Yet as a trade union leader, Salvador was, more than anything else, Castro’s man, and he ultimately depended on the Cuban leader’s popularity among workers. (At times, this dependence on Castro opened Salvador to justified Communist criticism—for example, when Salvador defended the government-inspired no-strike pledge.) This incipient non-Communist radical current lasted only a short time. Former top officials such as Fernández, Oltuski, and Pérez abandoned their earlier independent radicalism and remained in the government, although for the most part in somewhat less prominent positions. Franqui went into exile in the late 1960s, and Salvador was deposed as trade union leader in 1960 and arrested as he was illegally trying to leave the country. The group of “humanist” trade union leaders who had collaborated with Salvador against the Communist attempt to take over the unions did not survive the purges that followed the November 1959 trade union congress.
Finally, neither the pro-Communist wing of the 26th of July Movement led by Raúl Castro and Guevara nor the PSP was immune to Fidel Castro’s all-encompassing power. Had Fidel turned in a different political direction, Guevara and Raúl might have split with him and attempted to create their own political organization, perhaps in alliance with the old Communists. But it is doubtful that they could have made major political inroads in challenging Fidel Castro. Guevara was not even Cuban-born, a fact that would have surely become a political issue if he had publicly broken with Fidel in 1959 or 1960, at the very height of Castro’s popularity. Raúl Castro was and continues to be, almost fifty years after the revolution, far less popular than his older brother. For their part, the old Cuban Communists had a very compromised political history and questionable revolutionary legitimacy because they physically joined the guerrilla camp only in 1958, a few months before victory. Given their close ties and subordination to Moscow, they also had at best doubtful credentials as Cuban nationalists and a proclivity to organizational sectarianism that seriously damaged many of their leaders even when their party came around to supporting Castro’s regime. This sectarianism led to a serious confrontation with Fidel Castro in 1962 and a less serious one in 1968, the so-called microfaction dispute.22 The more sectarian members of the PSP, led by Aníbal Escalante, predictably lost to Castro’s new Communists in both instances.
Castro’s hegemony and mechanisms of political control had remarkable success in enabling him to quickly consolidate political and social power at home. This rapid victory was also facilitated by the Cuban refugee policy adopted by the United States shortly after the Cuban revolutionaries’ victory. By facilitating Cuban emigration to the United States, the U.S. government unwittingly provided a safety valve for the Cuban government, which would otherwise have confronted a far larger opposition constituency at home. However, the Cuban revolutionary government had much less success in dealing with U.S. opposition than with its Cuban domestic counterpart. Castro’s political dissimulation of his anti-imperialist politics significantly helped to delay U.S. hostility toward his movement while it was in opposition and, to a degree, after it came to power. The U.S. government quickly recognized the revolutionary government and refrained from open and total hostility during the first five months of 1959. But while the politically unorganized Cuban domestic opposition succumbed to Fidel Castro’s salami tactics, such was hardly the case with the U.S. government. In this context, it is useful to compare the reaction of the U.S. oil companies with the reaction of the U.S. government to the Cuban demand that the companies refine Russian oil. As we saw in the previous chapter, the oil companies were willing, to a certain extent, to play ball with the Cuban government, thus allowing themselves to be part of Fidel Castro’s divide-and-conquer methodology. In this context, the existence of a strong, centralized, and determined opponent of Fidel Castro in the form of the executive wing of the U.S. government made those tactics inoperable.
Castro’s political mode of functioning, particularly in regard to his tactics, shows him as a clever revolutionary politician cast in a very different mold from the PSP leaders. By the time of the revolution, these older leaders already had very long and compromised political careers—they had supported Batista from 1938 to 1944. Yet in spite of their considerable political skills and opportunism, these leaders were nevertheless compelled to operate within the limits of their Stalinist ideology and their organizational and international political commitments to the Soviet bloc. As we saw in greater detail in chapter 2, such was certainly not the case with Fidel Castro.
If the revolutionary process was at all times firmly controlled from above, is it correct to conclude, as many Cuban liberals and conservatives have, that the revolutionary process was artificially imposed on a Cuban reality that did not need a social revolution? Prior to January 1, 1959, certain political factors had led to the predominance of a revolutionary political perspective and the absence of a socially revolutionary approach. This contributed to the mistaken impression that the country was not, objectively speaking, in need of a social revolution.
The prevailing popular consciousness among Cubans of all social classes during the struggle against Batista was not one of class struggle, social revolution, or anti-imperialism. Between 1952 and 1958, a growing and widespread consciousness supported a political revolution to reestablish the rule of the democratic and progressive pro–welfare state constitution of 1940. There was also a wish to abolish politiquería.
The political consciousness that prevailed in the 1950s differed from the one that prevailed during the 1933 revolution, which had an explicit social component.23 During the 1950s, serious poverty and the chronic problems of substantial unemployment resulting primarily from the cyclical nature of the sugar industry plagued Cuba’s economy and society. However, at least in the urban areas, no major depression occurred, bringing with it desperation and extreme poverty, as had been the case during the 1930s. By the 1950s, the apparently strong unions, which had organized close to half of the labor force, had become highly bureaucratic and corrupt and had agreed to support the Batista dictatorship in exchange for the general preservation of the collective bargaining status quo. This meant that no frontal attack or major state/employer offensive occurred against the unions; instead, their previous gains were gradually eroded. The central union leadership forcefully suppressed dissident forces whose activity could threaten this agreement. The organized working class thus suffered under a double dictatorship: that of Eusebio Mujal’s trade union leadership and that of Fulgencio Batista. Without autonomous organizations, the Cuban workers became atomized. One major result was that as the workers increasingly turned against the Batista dictatorship, they did so as individual citizens rather than as members of working-class collective organizations.24 In contrast, the struggle against Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship coincided with early militant efforts to organize the working class into unions; consequently, a radical working-class consciousness played a much more significant role in that process.
In the 1930s, when the Platt Amendment was still in force and the U.S. government openly interfered in Cuban political affairs, the popular movement against the Machado dictatorship had been imbued with an open and explicit anti-imperialist sentiment. Such was no longer the case by the 1940s and 1950s, when although most Cubans criticized the U.S. foreign policy of supporting Latin American dictatorships, these criticisms were framed in the liberal populist terms of the “errors” and “mistakes” of U.S. foreign policy and did not constitute part of a critique of U.S. foreign policy as a systemic imperialist expression of capitalist and Cold War interests. Even the term “imperialism” had disappeared from the Cuban political vocabulary except among Communists and a handful of others. Fidel Castro has commented on this development on several occasions, most recently on a September 4, 1995, visit to the University of Havana that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of his enrollment in the School of Law. Castro pointed out that in 1945, “the anti-imperialist sentiment had grown much weaker, including in our university, which had been the bastion of anti-imperialism. . . . I was a witness to all this. I talked with all kinds of people, law students, people in every faculty, and almost never heard anyone say anything anti-imperialist.”25 Communist leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez expressed a similar view about the situation prevailing eight years later. On the first postrevolutionary anniversary of Fidel Castro’s July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada barracks, Rodríguez recalled,
Anti-imperialism was then a proscribed word, a set of ideas that the majority of our compañeros considered to be deadly. For saying that anti-imperialism was the present Cuban form of patriotism, those who thought in that fashion were considered to be agents of a foreign power. I am not referring here to the professional servants of imperialism or to the anti-revolutionaries who have always existed. . . . Young people whom we knew to be honest, stung as we were by the suffering of our fatherland, lived convinced that Cuba’s independence was a Yankee gift and that our denunciations of national oppression were simply ways of serving an idea that they considered anti-Cuban.26
A number of reasons accounted for this important ideological and political change. The Platt Amendment had been abolished in 1934, bringing about a more indirect, less visible role for U.S. influence and pressure on Cuban politics. The nationalist legislation and the political and cultural climate that emerged from the 1933 revolution had brought about a certain degree of Cubanization of the lower and middle managerial personnel in U.S.-owned businesses in Cuba, reducing the likelihood that Cuban workers and peasants received direct orders from North American supervisors. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Good Neighbor Policy were received sympathetically in Cuba, and widespread anti-Franco and antifascist popular sentiment channeled into support for the United States and the allies in World War II. This pro-West political climate developed with considerable help from the Cuban Communists and was furthered by the island’s postwar economic boom caused by higher world consumption of sugar and the war damage suffered by many of Cuba’s sugar-producing competitors. Much of this political climate later became incorporated into Cuban support for the United States and its allies during the Cold War, to the obvious detriment of the Cuban Communists, who had encouraged the earlier support for the Allied powers. Finally, the term “left” had disappeared from the political vocabulary except, again, among Communists and a few others. The term rarely, if ever, appeared in any of the documents and manifestoes drafted by the 26th of July Movement, at least at the national level.
In the years following the depression, Cuba became more modernized, particularly in the urban areas, which were home to 57 percent of the population according to the 1953 census. As we saw in greater detail in chapter 1, Cuba had relatively developed means of communication and was among the first countries to have commercial television. Contrary to the expectations of African American singer and poet Gil Scott Heron, the revolution was televised, at least in the case of Cuba. Commercial radio enveloped the country and had been culturally influential since the late 1920s, and the same held true for the mass consumption of movies, particularly in the cities. All of these processes led to a considerable diffusion of U.S. cultural artifacts, a phenomenon that historian Louis A. Pérez has explained in illuminating detail.27 This may help to explain why post-1959 Cuban nationalism and anti-imperialism was and continues to be more political and less cultural, at least in Third World comparative terms. Cuba has proven itself willing to accept modernity in spite of its real and imagined connection with the United States. However, the pervasive U.S. cultural influence was nevertheless more marked among the middle and upper classes and, as suggested earlier, in urban areas. In Cuba, U.S. cultural influence competed with the substantial weight of Spanish and Latin American culture. Postcolonial twentieth-century Cuba experienced extensive Spanish immigration, and popular identification with the rest of Latin America was strong, deeply rooted, and greatly encouraged by such important phenomena as the Mexican cinema, especially during its golden age of the 1940s and 1950s.
None of these factors that militated against anti-imperialist politics precluded the existence and even strengthening of a certain kind of nationalism of what could be called the “Cuba is beautiful” variety, referring to a multiclass cultural nationalism almost universally shared by the Cuban population. Largely devoid of a specific social and political content, it expresses pride in the cultural distinctiveness of Cuban society and its particular contributions to world culture, such as its music. It is also a “flag and national anthem” nationalism that affirms the blind devotion to one’s native land and defense against those who might defame it or diminish its importance. In this sense, right-wing Cuban exiles in South Florida are nationalist even though quite paradoxically they may also be Plattistas (after the 1901 Platt Amendment), fully supporting the reestablishment of U.S. economic and political control of the island. A few of these exiles, such as writer Carlos Alberto Montaner,28 have openly supported Cuba’s annexation to the United States while remaining nationalists in the cultural sense.
By the 1950s, the radicalism of the 1930s, including the radicalism of the working class, had been largely submerged and replaced by a sort of militant but yet somewhat classless democratic populism that for the most part represented a response to the profound popular disappointment with the failures and corruption of the revolutionaries of the 1930s who held power from 1944 to 1952. After this traumatic political failure, cynicism, disappointment, and fatalism pervaded the Cuban body politic. In this context, a political phenomenon such as Chibasismo (after Eduardo Chibás, the former Auténtico leader who in the late 1940s founded the Ortodoxo Party) developed as a political revival movement with a strong emphasis on public morality. This phenomenon should not be confused, however, with the North American ideology of puritanism, with its strong emphasis on individual, private morality—for example, the North American political obsession (right, left, and center) with the institution of the family and the sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit premise that no important differences exist between the public and private realms.29 This emphasis on public morality was critical to the revival of Cuban political life in the late 1940s and 1950s but did not constitute a strong class-and socially rooted set of politics. Although this view strongly dominated among the population at large, a number of militant political groups took a socially radical perspective, typically expressing it in a rather vague, nonspecific fashion. Thus, for example, the Directorio Revolucionario’s February 25, 1958, Declaration of Escambray insisted that a successful revolution should, beyond the immediate task of restoring the rights and social gains suppressed by the Batista dictatorship, bring about education, administrative honesty, agrarian reform, and industrialization, but the declaration did not even hint at how those worthy goals could or should be brought to fruition.30 Even the Workers’ Bureau of the reputedly more left-wing Second Front led by Raúl Castro in Oriente Province declared itself in favor of agrarian reform but did not specify what such reform would mean in concrete policy terms. The bureau’s pronouncement in favor of the elimination of latifundia was cast in very general terms (e.g., it entirely avoided the issue of compensation for land seized by the state) and was therefore unlikely to provoke disagreement within the broad coalition opposing the Batista dictatorship.31 In any case, whatever social-radical perspectives existed within the rebel forces had no major political effect before January 1, 1959. The changes that took place in the 26th of July Movement, by far the most important of the opposition groups, are instructive in this regard. Although Castro’s group originally maintained socially radical positions, its orientation changed after 1955, when, as we saw in chapter 2, Fidel Castro decided to adapt himself to the prevailing political consciousness and put forward a program of militant political revolution.
Instead of challenging the prevailing ideology pertaining to social questions, Castro opted to obtain organizational control as the way to maximize his future political options when the relation of social and political forces changed in his favor. This organizational control became possible for two reasons: the failures and collapse of alternative opposition organizations, and the monopoly of power he obtained within the 26th of July Movement after the deaths of Frank País and other leaders and the failure of the April 1958 strike. Castro’s strategy constituted a manipulative response to the major gap that prevailed in the late 1950s between what the top revolutionary leaders perceived as the objective possibilities for a social revolution in Cuba and the lack of subjective readiness for it among the overwhelming majority of the population. After Batista’s overthrow and having achieved hegemony in the country, Castro could close the gap by choosing the time and manner in which to adopt radical measures, taking into account only the strength of the propertied classes’ opposition. He knew or could anticipate that he could more or less take mass support for granted, since his radical measures would find support among those deriving material benefit from them. Thus, these masses would support and participate in what would come to be known as the mass organizations but would not truly and democratically control these organizations, let alone their own destiny. The mass rally, in which leaders control the podium and speak and spell out policies while the masses applaud, not daring to amend or object, became emblematic of the regime.
Such manipulative methods, together with the spying functions of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the activities of the newly established state security apparatus, the purging of many individuals and groups, and the elimination of all opposition and independent newspapers (which occurred during the summer of 1960, when most of the printed and visual media supported the regime and the government faced no clear and present danger), completed the tripod on which Castro consolidated his power: popular support, manipulation of that support, and repression. When the first two could not be trusted to secure the government’s power, the third took over.
Fidel Castro’s political hegemony and the complete collapse of Cuba’s traditional army opened ample opportunities for the revolutionary transformations necessitated by the serious problems and distortions of Cuba’s economy and society. Although the social revolution and class struggle were always controlled from above, they were accompanied by mass radicalization and participation. During the earliest stages of the revolution, most Cubans were in a true state of euphoria while all sorts of long-suppressed popular demands, complaints, and requests emerged into the public limelight, often with the support of strikes. Castro and the revolutionary government quickly became concerned about the frequency of such strikes and virtually eliminated them while preventing the development of any sense of frustration, let alone betrayal, among Cuban workers. Castro skillfully utilized this situation to educate the working class to subordinate its immediate material demands to what Castro considered to be the revolution’s political needs. At the same time, he kept the Communists at bay by holding over their heads the threat that they could be blamed for inspiring strikes or other actions called independently of his government. In this manner, Castro killed two birds with one stone: he served notice to the Communists that he was in charge and that they had better toe the line, and he ingratiated himself with those concerned with the rise of Communist influence.
The Castro-led forces came to power with a great deal of popular support, prestige, and credibility. Fidel Castro’s political dexterity and tactical skills allowed him to preserve and build on this political capital. The execution of several hundred Batistiano war criminals under widely varying conditions of fairness—those executed in Santiago de Cuba under the supervision of Raúl Castro came closest to legal lynchings—in the very early stages of the revolutionary process served important political purposes that have not yet been fully appreciated. Those shootings constituted key instruments in shaking up the political cynicism that had gripped the Cuban political psyche for the previous twenty-five to thirty years. With these executions, the revolutionary government signaled that 1959 was not 1933 and that the new revolution meant business. Similarly, the honest and disciplined behavior of the rebel soldiers and authorities in the early stages of the revolution reinforced the message that the people’s trust would not again be betrayed. The announcement early in the Castro regime that serious cases of misappropriation of funds by public officials might be punished with the death penalty might have sounded harsh to foreign observers, but it was music to the ears of most Cubans, who had despaired of and become cynical about the possibility of public officials ever being honest. Cubans of all classes, particularly the working class and the poor, were pleased by the brand-new revolutionary police force’s lack of abusive behavior. Many of these new police officers were politically aware revolutionaries and had had no time to develop the deformation of character common to members of all professional repressive institutions. Other early measures—for example, the opening of all beaches to the public early in 1959—met with widespread approval among workers and the poor, especially the black population, which had been the principal victim of the private appropriation of public facilities such as beaches and, in some provincial towns, parks. So, without explicitly appealing to specific class-warfare themes early in his regime, Castro obtained and consolidated an overwhelming amount of popular support.32
Months later, however, Castro started to take measures that had sharper teeth and shattered the multiclass coalition of the 1956–58 period. Thus, for example, the drastic reduction of rents by as much as 50 percent in March 1959 shook up Cuban society. While this action alienated some sections of the upper and upper-middle classes, it cemented popular support and definitively established that the revolution was dedicated to the material improvement of the working class and the poor. The May 1959 agrarian reform law eliminated whatever doubt might have remained on this score. By this time, the revolutionary regime was clearly enjoying huge popular support materially based on the substantial redistribution of income that took place during its first year in power.33
Although an undeniable radicalization of the Cuban masses occurred early in the revolution, that shift moved from the leaders to the masses rather than the other way around. The various forms of the leaders’ radicalism had filtered in various ways down to the masses, who continued to support the various measures Castro periodically and unexpectedly produced after long sessions with his close associates. Thus, very few Cubans had any idea about the nature and degree of radicalism of the May 1959 agrarian reform law prior to Castro’s announcement of the measure, and the government followed this procedure with virtually all important social legislation during this and subsequent periods. While prosperity and popular policies of redistribution continued at least until the first shortages began to be seriously felt in 1961, the leadership garnered great success in selling its revolutionary fait accompli to most Cubans.34
As indicated in the preceding chapter, the May 1959 agrarian reform law had the critical effect of raising U.S. hostility to the Cuban regime to a new level. The U.S. press and government’s animosity to the January 1959 executions had already began to resurrect a mass anti-imperialist sentiment that had not existed since the 1930s. The multifaceted U.S. opposition to the Cuban government that developed after May 1959 raised popular anti-imperialism to a level that surpassed that of 1933. The contrast with the Bolivian Revolution, also discussed in chapter 3, is also relevant here. The leaders of the right wing of the Bolivian Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario typically disavowed an intransigent opposition to imperial capitalism, hoping to come to the earliest possible agreement with Washington and U.S. capital. The opposite happened in Cuba: instead of quieting down popular anti-imperialism, Cuban leaders typically raised the ante and encouraged its development, often at massive demonstrations. Unlike the Bolivian leaders, the Cubans were in no hurry to enter into negotiations with the United States, as demonstrated by Fidel Castro’s avoidance of and repeated delays in meeting with U.S. Ambassador Philip Bonsal. More than anything else, Castro seems to have wanted to have the process of mass radicalization run its course rather than to bring it to a halt by an early agreement with the United States. This behavior expressed a combative and aggressive attitude toward imperial capitalism rather than a defensive and measured response to U.S. acts against Cuba.
It is therefore not difficult to understand the reaction of people who opposed the radicalization of the revolution and who still had fresh memories of the revolution’s pre-1959, socially moderate stage. These people might have perceived the sudden radicalization, whether in anti-imperialist or in domestic terms, as merely representing the outcome of sinister maneuvers by Castro and his close associates. Whether or not Fidel Castro fabricated some accusations to exacerbate mass anti-imperialist sentiment,35 the rebirth of mass anti-imperialism in Cuba cannot simply be attributed to Castro’s manipulation. Castro did not need to invent a popular reaction among a people becoming more conscious of their subordination to U.S. imperial power, the reality of which was constantly being proven by the actions of the U.S. power structure itself. This deepened anti-imperialist consciousness was accompanied by a growing sentiment of solidarity with Latin America, particularly with those countries such as the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua that remained under corrupt dictatorships endorsed and supported by the United States.