1. “Homenaje a la República” [Homage to the Republic], Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Madrid) 24 (Spring 2002): 5–151.
2. While the bulk of this work is brand-new, segments of this volume overlap with two of my previous publications on Cuba. I want to thank the publishers for their permission to use materials from those publications in this volume: Samuel Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960: A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976); Samuel Farber, “The Cuban Communists in the Early Stages of the Cuban Revolution: Revolutionaries or Reformists?” Latin American Research Review 18 (March 1983): 59–83; copyright © 1983 by the University of Texas Press; all rights reserved.
3. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. 6, Cuba (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991).
4. Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files: Cuba, 1955–1959: Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs, 25 reels (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1987).
5. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997).
6. See, for example, Luis Báez, Secretos de Generales (Havana: Editorial Si-Mar, 1996); William Gálvez, Camilo: Señor de la Vanguardia (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1979); William Gálvez, Frank: Entre el Sol y la Montaña, 2 vols. (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1991); Enrique Oltuski, Vida Clandestina: My Life in the Cuban Revolution, trans. Thomas Christensen and Carol Christensen (New York: Wiley, 2002).
7. Herbert Dinerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 1.
8. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 11–15.
9. For a discussion of this issue, see Farber, Revolution and Reaction.
10. James O’Connor, The Origins of Socialism in Cuba (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 11. While this work was published many decades ago, it remains the most sophisticated expression of the “objectivist” views discussed here.
11. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61.
1. Norton Ginsberg, Atlas of Economic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 18.
2. Pedro C. M. Teichert, “Analysis of Real Growth and Wealth in the Latin American Republics,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 1 (April 1959): 184–85.
3. Eugene Staley, The Future of Underdeveloped Countries, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1961), 16–17.
4. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 285.
5. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Report on Cuba (Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1951), 7.
6. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15.
7. International Bank, Report on Cuba, 65.
8. Francisco López Segrera, Cuba: Capitalismo Dependiente y Subdesarrollo (1510–1959) (Havana: Editora de Ciencias Sociales, 1981), 158–59.
9. Ibid., 153.
10. Julio Le Riverend, Historia Económica de Cuba (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, n.d.), 594–97.
11. Ibid., 626–27.
12. Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898–1958, trans. Marjorie Moore (Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1998), 17.
13. Pérez, Cuba, 280–81.
14. Ibid., 252, 279–80.
15. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba: Basic Information for United States Businessmen (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 137.
16. Ismael Zuaznabar, La Economía Cubana en la Década del 50 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1986), 22–23.
17. Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 74.
18. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Cuba en el Tránsito al Socialismo, 1959–1963 (Havana: Editora Política, 1979), 24.
19. Le Riverend, Historia Económica de Cuba (n.d.), 650–53; López Segrera, Cuba, 197–99; Zuaznabar, Economía Cubana, 35–37; Dudley Seers, “The Economic and Social Background,” in Cuba: The Economic and Social Revolution, ed. Dudley Seers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 11; Julio Le Riverend, Historia Económica de Cuba (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1967), 252.
20. Andrés Bianchi, “Agriculture: The Pre-Revolutionary Background,” in Economic and Social Revolution, ed. Seers, 83–84.
21. Julián Alienes y Urosa, Características Fundamentales de la Economía Cubana (Havana: Banco Nacional de Cuba, 1950), 113.
22. Bianchi, “Agriculture,” 86.
23. López Segrera, Cuba, 158–59.
24. International Bank, Report on Cuba, 197–98; Bianchi, “Agriculture,” 93.
25. Bianchi, “Agriculture,” 91.
26. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Unemployment in Socialist Countries: Soviet Union, East Europe, China, and Cuba” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1968), 371–73.
27. Claes Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba: The Challenge of Economic Growth with Equity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984), 13.
28. For an excellent discussion of the concept of uneven development (or “combined and uneven development”), see Leon Trotsky, “Peculiarities of Russia’s Development,” chap. 1 of The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957); see also Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (New York: Merit, 1969). Sociologist Martin Murray, The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina (1870–1940) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), has utilized this concept in analyzing capitalist development in colonial Indochina. Writers outside the Marxist tradition such as Thorstein Veblen have also dealt with the significance of late economic development in social analysis; see Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966). For a more contemporary analysis along these lines, see Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966).
29. Alienes y Urosa, Características Fundamentales, 12, 39–40; James O’Connor, The Origins of Socialism in Cuba (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 13. The 1907 Cuban census tallied 2,048,980 persons; twelve years later, the census found a population of 2,889,004, including more than 245,000 Spanish-born persons (just over 8 percent of the total); and in 1931, 3,962,344 people were counted. For Spanish influence in Cuba, see Guillermo J. Grenier and Lisandro Pérez, The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), 36–37.
30. For an extensive discussion of these issues, see Samuel Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960: A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976).
31. López Segrera, Cuba.
32. Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García, Sugar and Railroads: A Cuban History, 1837–1959, trans. Franklin W. Knight and Mary Todd (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 33.
33. International Bank, Report on Cuba, 241.
34. For purposes of comparison, the United Kingdom is 847 miles long but much broader than the narrow island of Cuba. Cuba’s total surface area is close to that of the state of Pennsylvania.
35. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba, 114.
36. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Sobre el Sistema Presupuestario de Financiamiento,” in Escritos Económicos (Córdoba, Arg.: Cuadernos del Pasado y Presente, 1969), 41.
37. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba, 24.
38. K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 45.
39. Ibid., 46, 124; see also Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula, Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15, 19.
40. Stoner, From the House, 133.
41. Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 173.
42. Seers, “Economic and Social Background,” 18.
43. Jose Luis Rodríguez, “La Economía Neocolonial Cubana,” Cuba Socialista 37 (January–February 1989): 121.
44. Pérez, Cuba, 301.
45. Pérez-Stable, Cuban Revolution, 29.
46. Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 166.
47. Ibid., 162.
48. Agrupación Católica Universitaria, Encuesta de Trabajadores Rurales, 1956–57, reprinted in Economía y Desarrollo (Instituto de Economía de la Universidad de la Habana) (July–August 1972): 188–212.
49. Ibid., 191.
50. Ibid., 211.
51. Ibid., 206; Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 162.
52. Agrupación Católica Universitaria, Encuesta, 196–200.
53. Ibid., 201–2.
54. Ibid., 207–9.
55. López Segrera, Cuba, 270.
56. See Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 141–51. For a more extended discussion of blacks in Cuba during the period 1933–58, see Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 175–255.
57. Seers, “Economic and Social Background,” 25; International Bank, Report on Cuba, 138.
58. International Bank, Report on Cuba, 6.
59. Agrupación Católica Universitaria, Encuesta, 203–4.
60. Seers, “Economic and Social Background,” 16.
61. Ibid., 15, 22.
62. International Bank, Report on Cuba, 7, 9, 146, 566–69.
63. This question is discussed at length in Farber, Revolution and Reaction, 235–37.
64. Le Riverend, Historia Económica (n.d.), 638–39.
65. O’Connor, Origins of Socialism, 66.
66. Seers, “Economic and Social Background,” 88.
67. International Bank, Report on Cuba, 360.
68. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba, 4.
69. At about the same time, the Tribunal de Cuentas (Tribunal of Accounts) was established to attempt to audit and control the income and expenditures of governmental institutions.
70. International Bank, Report On Cuba, 630–35.
71. Hispanic World Report 2 (June 1949): 32; Hispanic World Report 2 (July 1949): 33.
72. Business Week, December 18, 1948, 117.
73. I am indebted to Dan Labotz for this formulation regarding how uneven development affected the Cuban working class.
74. International Bank, Report on Cuba, 66, 357–59, 525–27, 597, 779.
75. Ibid., 25, 386.
76. Ibid., 29.
77. Ibid., 119.
78. Ibid., 125.
79. Ibid., 357–89.
80. Ibid., 359.
81. I am indebted to Mel Bienenfield for the formulation regarding the economic consequences of uneven Cuban development.
82. Robin Blackburn, “Prologue to the Cuban Revolution,” New Left Review 21 (October 1963): 71.
83. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba, 21.
84. Ibid., 19; see also Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 102.
85. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Economic Survey of Latin America for 1953 (New York: U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1954), 17.
86. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Economic Survey of Latin America for 1954 (New York: U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1955), 161.
87. José Luis Rodríguez, “Economía Neocolonial,” 117.
88. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Economic Survey of Latin America for 1957 (New York: U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1959), 177.
89. Ibid., 183.
90. For the view that the Cuban economy grew at a very slow rate in the 1950s but promised to do better in the 1960s, see Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Economic Policies and Growth,” in Revolutionary Change in Cuba, ed. Carmelo Mesa-Lago (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 277–338. For the view that the Cuban economy had stagnated since the depression, see, for example, Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba, chap. 1; O’Connor, Origins of Socialism; Seers, “Economic and Social Background.”
91. Seers, “Economic and Social Background,” 12.
92. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba, 37.
93. Ibid., 16.
94. Juan F. Fuentes and Graciela Chailloux, “El Conflicto: Fuerzas Productivas y Relaciones de Producción como Causa Determinante del Triunfo de la Revolución Social en Cuba,” Economía y Desarrollo 94 (September–October 1986): 64.
95. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Economic Survey of Latin America for 1957, 183.
96. Bianchi, “Agriculture,” 72, 76–78.
97. Pérez-Stable, Cuban Revolution, 26.
98. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba, 140.
99. López Segrera, Cuba, 237–38.
100. Cuban Economic Research Project, A Study on Cuba (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1965), 620, 622.
1. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 147–48.
2. Joan Casanovas, “La Nación, la Independencia, y las Clases,” Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Madrid) 15 (Winter 1999–2000): 177–86.
3. Manuel Pedro González and Iván E. Schulman, José Martí: Esquema Ideológico (Mexico City: Publicaciones de la Editorial Cultura, 1961), 385–86; my translation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own.
4. Many Communist and populist activists and leaders of the 1930s began their involvement in politics in movements of the 1920s such as the Protest of the Thirteen, Minorismo, and the Veterans and Patriots movement (Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 236–48).
5. This decline appeared as early as the general elections of 1948, when Communist presidential candidate Juan Marinello obtained only 5.61 percent of the vote (Charles D. Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952 [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000], 65).
6. Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me, in Revolutionary Struggle, 1947–1958, vol. 1 of The Selected Works of Fidel Castro, ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 183.
7. Andrés Suárez, Cuba: Castroism and Communism, 1959–1966, trans. Joel Carmichael and Ernst Halperin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 6–7.
8. Luis Báez, Secretos de Generales (Havana: Editorial Si-Mar, 1996), 20, 60, 112, 172, 258, 496.
9. Some of the defining features of Stalinist Marxism were a highly schematic view of the stages of historical development—that is, by definition, Latin American “feudalism” would be replaced by capitalism, and capitalism could in turn be followed only by socialism, ignoring, for example, the classical Marxist notion that capitalism could be replaced by either socialism or barbarism. Stalinist Marxist class analysis often tended to be rigid as well as schematic—that is, Fidel Castro and his close associates represented the radical wing of the petty bourgeoisie even though Castro’s group had no organic institutional connections to that class. Stalinism was also strongly “substitutionist,” meaning first that the party defined itself as the representative of the working class regardless of the actually expressed views and wishes of that class and second that the party felt free to substitute its interests for those of the working class. This type of Marxism was also marked by an analytical opportunism where social analysis was developed in an ad hoc fashion to justify the numerous political twists and turns of the day. Finally, Stalinism meant a contempt for principled and consistent democratic practices whether inside the party (so-called democratic centralism) or in society at large (dismissing the need for civil liberties and democracy under socialism as a bourgeois notion).
10. Jorge G. Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Knopf, 1997), 103.
11. Ibid., 129; Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove, 1997), 347. On the issue of bank robbery, see Che Guevara’s letter to Enrique Oltuski [Sierra], November 3, 1958, in Enrique Oltuski, Vida Clandestina: My Life in the Cuban Revolution, trans. Thomas Christensen and Carol Christensen (New York: Wiley, 2002), 198–99.
12. K. Lynn Stoner, “Militant Heroines and the Consecration of the Patriarchal State: The Glorification of Loyalty, Combat, and National Suicide in the Making of Cuban National Identity,” Cuban Studies 34 (2003): 92; Glen Caudill Dealy, The Public Man: An Interpretation of Latin American and Other Catholic Cultures (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977); Glen Caudill Dealy, The Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992).
13. William Ian Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 83–87, 116–24.
14. Dealy views dignity primarily in terms of external matters such as dress and manners, not as the opposite of humiliation and disrespect; see Dealy, Public Man, 98–107.
15. William Gálvez, Camilo: Señor de la Vanguardia (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1979), 357–58.
16. The value of loyalty also applied to sports. Even though winter league professional baseball teams were not, during the 1940s and 1950s, locally based, loyalty to one’s chosen team was taken very seriously. There was no worse person than a cambia casaca (turncoat) who had changed his or her team loyalties. A cambia casaca who had changed loyalties from a losing to a winning team was, if anything, even more strongly repudiated.
17. Craig Calhoun, “The Problem of Identity in Collective Action,” in Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology, ed. Joan Huber (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991), 64, 68.
18. Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution, Cuban Communist Appeals, and the Soviet Response,” World Politics 21 (October 1968): 43.
19. Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula, Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21.
20. Ibid., 22–23.
21. Ibid., 27, 30. See also Tiffany A. Thomas-Woodard, “‘Towards the Gates of Eternity’: Celia Sánchez Manduley and the Creation of Cuba’s New Woman,” Cuban Studies 34 (2003): 154–80.
22. Lois M. Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 32.
23. Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, 1988), 48–50.
24. Maida Donate-Armada and Zoila Macías, El Suicidio en Miami y en Cuba (Miami, Fla.: Consejo Nacional Cubanoamericano, 1998), 7.
25. I thank historian Louis A. Pérez, who is currently working on the topic of suicide in Cuba, for this insight and information.
26. Émile Durkheim, Suicide (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), 217–40. According to historian Louis A. Pérez, Cuba has had a high suicide rate since even before the twentieth century. See also Donate-Armada and Macías, Suicidio, 13–18.
27. Ameringer, Cuban Democratic Experience, 39–40, 87, 148.
28. For a further discussion of this generational theme in Cuban politics, see Maurice Zeitlin, Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class (New York: Harper Torch-books, 1970), chap. 9.
29. Here I differ from Edward González, who many years ago addressed many of the issues discussed in this chapter. González saw the generation of 1953 as “committed to nationalism, anti-imperialism and revolutionary change” without noting the important changes in Cuban political culture that had taken place since the early 1940s (Cuba under Castro: The Limits of Charisma [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974], 32).
30. The literal translation of vergüenza is “shame,” but that constitutes an unclear and awkward rendition of what Chibás and the Ortodoxo Party had in mind.
31. Luis Conte Agüero, Eduardo Chibás: El Adalid de Cuba (Mexico City: Editorial JUS, 1955), 729, 688–89, 602–3.
32. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, “El Patriotismo Autonomista,” El Nuevo Herald (Miami), July 31, 2000.
33. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, “Mayo de 1902: La Marcha Cívica de Tomás Estrada Palma,” El Nuevo Herald (Miami), May 20, 1999, A15.
34. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, “Tribuna del Lector: Elogio de Carlos Márquez Sterling,” El Nuevo Herald (Miami), September 8, 1998, A10. This is also the view of another prominent advocate of the new Cuban liberalism; see Rafael Rojas, “Precursores,” El Nuevo Herald (Miami), January 18, 2005, A21. For Márquez Sterling’s recommendation, through attorneys Mario Lazo (Márquez Sterling’s cousin) and Jorge Cubas, to the U.S. government, see “Telegram from the Embassy in Cuba to the Department of State,” Havana, November 6, 1958, 5 P.M., in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. 6, Cuba (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), 251.
35. See, for example, the collection “Dossier Europa del Este,” with articles by Adam Michnik, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Elzbetia Matynia, Miguel Angel Centeno and Tania Rands, and Marcin Krol, in Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Madrid) 25 (Summer 2002): 181–257; Adam Michnik, “La Lógica del Compromiso,” Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Madrid) 32 (Spring 2004): 271–75, warning Cubans against the “utopia” of the third way or road, which in his view can lead only to the Third World.
36. I experienced this personally as a political activist in my public high school near Havana in the mid-1950s. The budgets of the student groups had so routinely been stolen by their successive leaders that I and my associates faced deeply entrenched mistrust when our slate, with myself as cotreasurer, was elected to run the graduating committee for the academic year 1955–56. This committee, elected after a strongly fought political campaign, organized and raised funds to finance and organize the graduation ceremony and served as intermediaries in our classmates’ purchases of graduation rings. We literally had to go out of our way not only to be honest but also to appear to be honest. In the end—to the amazement of students, faculty, and staff—the unprecedented occurred: we not only covered several thousand dollars in normal graduation expenses but produced a surplus with which we bought books for the high school’s library.
37. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, “Democracia y Soberanía: La Nueva Cuba a la Luz de Su Pasado,” Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Madrid) 6–7 (Fall–Winter 1997): 195.
38. Hugh Thomas, “Middle Class Politics and the Cuban Revolution,” in The Politics of Conformity in Latin America, ed. Claudio Véliz (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 261.
39. Crecencio Pérez, one of Fidel Castro’s few early supporters in the Sierra Maestra, who had a long record of leading peasant struggles, played virtually no leadership role in the revolutionary government after victory.
40. Báez, Secretos de Generales.
41. Gálvez, Camilo, 99. See also Carlos Franqui, Camilo Cienfuegos (Barcelona: Seix Barral los Tres Mundos, 2001).
42. Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa, 16.
43. Leslie Dewart, Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 103–5.
44. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 982–83.
45. Dewart, Christianity and Revolution, 105–7.
46. Wyatt MacGaffey and Clifford R. Barnett, Twentieth-Century Cuba: The Background of the Castro Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1965), 243.
47. Mateo Jover Marimón, “The Church,” in Revolutionary Change in Cuba, ed. Carmelo Mesa-Lago (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 400–402.
48. Marcos A. Ramos, Protestantism and Revolution in Cuba (Coral Gables, Fla.: Research Institute for Cuban Studies, Institute for Interamerican Studies, Graduate School for International Studies, University of Miami, 1989), 139–40.
49. MacGaffey and Barnett, Twentieth-Century Cuba, 245.
50. Ramos, Protestantism and Revolution, 48.
51. Ibid., 53, 166, 49–50.
52. Among those who studied at Protestant schools were Armando Hart and Pepín Naranjo; the teachers included José Antonio Portuondo, an important intellectual in Castro’s Cuba (Ramos, Protestantism and Revolution, 36).
53. Ibid., 37.
54. Ibid.
55. MacGaffey and Barnett, Twentieth-Century Cuba, 245.
56. Ibid.
57. While Fidel Castro’s official birth date is August 13, 1926, he was actually born on August 13, 1927. His father had Fidel’s original birth certificate changed so that he could enroll at the Belén high school (Claudia Furiati, Fidel Castro: La Historia Me Absolverá, trans. Rosa S. Corgatelli [Barcelona: Plaza Janés, 2003], 48–49, 81).
58. Ibid., 89–90; Katiuska Blanco, Todo el Tiempo de los Cedros: Paisaje Familiar de Fidel Castro Ruz (Havana: Casa Editorial Abril, 2003), 208.
59. Fidel Castro, My Early Years, ed. Deborah Shnookal and Pedro Alvarez Tabío (Melbourne, Aus.: Ocean Press, 1998), 70.
60. Cited in Georgie Anne Geyer, Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 38.
61. Gabriel García Márquez, prologue to Gianni Mina, Habla Fidel (Mexico City: Edivisión Compañía Editorial, 1988), 18.
62. Suárez, Cuba, 13.
63. Nelson P. Valdés and Rolando E. Bonachea, “Fidel Castro y la Política Estudiantil de 1947 a 1952,” Aportes (Paris) 22 (October 1971): 33, 35.
64. While casting Castro’s student activism in a favorable light, Mario Mencía, “Fidel Castro en el Bogotazo,” Bohemia (Havana) 15 (April 14, 1978): 50–59; 16 (April 21, 1978): 50–57, conveys the flavor of student politics at the University of Havana in this period; see also Blanco, Todo el Tiempo, 223–44.
65. Charles D. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians, Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
66. For a favorable view and details of Fidel Castro’s participation in the Bogotazo, see Mencía, “Fidel Castro.”
67. The exception was the several volumes of Capital that Castro kept in his cell, of which he read only a relatively small part; see Mario Mencía, The Fertile Prison: Fidel Castro in Batista’s Jails (Melbourne, Aus.: Ocean Press, 1993), 40–41; Thomas, Cuba, 1375.
68. See Fidel Castro to Angel Castro, April 3, 1948, in Blanco, Todo el Tiempo, 247–51.
69. Suárez, Cuba, 15–16.
70. See Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: Norton, 1993), 618–29.
71. René Dumont, Cuba, Est-Il Socialiste? (Paris: Seuil, 1970).
72. Geyer, Guerrilla Prince, 51.
73. Castro, My Early Years, 75.
74. Ibid., 98.
75. Ibid., 126–27.
76. Ibid., 134.
77. Ibid.
78. Anderson, Che Guevara, 294.
79. Carlos Franqui, Diario de la Revolución Cubana (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1976), 362.
80. Rufo López Fresquet, My 14 Months with Castro (New York: World, 1966), 111–12. Felipe Pazos, another important Cuban functionary who traveled to the United States with Fidel Castro, told a similar story to Edward González. González also described several incidents indicating political tensions between Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara in April and May 1959. See Edward González, “The Cuban Revolution and the Soviet Union, 1959–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1966), 376–79.
81. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 18, 359.
82. Anderson, Che Guevara, 417.
83. Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: Morrow, 1986).
84. Ibid., 473.
85. Ibid., 475.
86. Both of these documents can be found in Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés, eds. Revolutionary Struggle, 1947–1958, vol. 1 of The Selected Works of Fidel Castro (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 164–220, 259–70.
87. According to Mencía, Fertile Prison, 110–11, the original plan was to print and distribute 100,000 copies of History Will Absolve Me. In the end, 27,500 copies were actually printed. Mencía mentions the names of several distributors of the pamphlet in various Cuban provinces but provides no figures on how many copies actually circulated.
88. Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 343–48.
89. Franqui, Diario, 473.
90. Luis Conte Agüero, 26 Cartas del Presidio (Havana: Editorial Cuba, 1960), 73. These letters were published before Conte Agüero’s break with Castro.
91. Franqui, Diario, 611.
92. William Gálvez, Frank: Entre el Sol y la Montaña (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1991), 2:542–49; see also Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 98–101.
1. This assessment is based on my exposure to liberal opinion over more than forty years of teaching and public speaking about Cuba to educational, union, and political groups.
2. Richard E. Welch Jr., Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 47.
3. Ibid.
4. The idea that Castro aimed to turn Cuba into a Communist country even before Eisenhower moved against the Cuban leader is central to Alan H. Luxenberg’s thesis that the United States was on the whole blameless for Castro’s move toward Communism; see Alan H. Luxenberg, “Did Eisenhower Push Castro into the Arms of the Soviets?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 30 (Spring 1988): 37–71.
5. For a comprehensive historical account of nineteenth-century U.S. interest in annexing the island, see Oscar Pino Santos, “De la Habana al Mississippi: La Isla Estratégica y la Teoría de la Anexión, 1800–1898,” Temas (Havana) 37–38 (April–September 2004): 146–58.
6. The complete text of the Platt Amendment can be found in Wyatt MacGaffey and Clifford R. Barnett, Twentieth-Century Cuba (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1965), 17.
7. “Cuba’s Great Expectations,” Business Week, December 18, 1948, 117–18; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 124. For an overall discussion and analysis of the period between the 1933 and 1959 revolutions, see Samuel Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960: A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976).
8. Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48. Although Morley looked at virtually all the same declassified U.S. documents as I did, we have reached somewhat different conclusions.
9. Former New York Times reporter Tad Szulc (Fidel: A Critical Portrait [New York: Morrow, 1986], 427–30) maintained that the CIA supplied funds to Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, perhaps without Castro’s knowledge, between the fall of 1957 and the middle of 1958. So far, neither Szulc nor anyone else has supplied the requisite evidence to confirm this claim. On the Cuban government’s side, General Fabián Escalante has made numerous claims about Central Intelligence Agency activities within the opposition to Batista. These claims are even harder to evaluate because they are for the most part based on information that Escalante claimed to have obtained from Cuban state security files; see Fabián Escalante, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations against Cuba 1959–62, ed. Mirta Muñiz, trans. Maxine Shaw (Melbourne, Aus.: Ocean Press, 1995).
10. See, for example, Morley, Imperial State, 61–68.
11. Szulc, Fidel, 448–50.
12. However, the U.S. ambassador to Havana’s consultative group of business executives from the local American community thought in late 1958 that the “Castro movement is Communist-inspired and dominated.” It is interesting to note that conservative and pro-Batista U.S. Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith refrained from endorsing that assessment (U.S. Embassy in Cuba to Department of State [telegram], December 2, 1958 [secret], in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. 6, Cuba [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991] [hereafter cited as FRUS], 276–77).
13. Cited in Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 252.
14. R. R. Rubottom to Christian A. Herter, October 23, 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 633–35.
15. R. R. Rubottom, to Christian A. Herter through S/S, December 30, 1959, in Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files: Cuba, 1955–1959: Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs, reel 25, internal affairs nos. 737, 837, 937; foreign affairs nos. 637, 611.37 (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1987) (hereafter cited as Central Files).
16. Lester D. Mallory to C. Douglas Dillon, February 24, 1960 (confidential), FRUS, 808–10.
17. Memorandum of discussion at the 429th meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, D.C., December 16, 1959 (top secret, eyes only), FRUS, 703–6.
18. Memorandum of discussion at the 432d meeting of the National Security Council, January 14, 1960 (top secret), FRUS, 740–46.
19. Arleigh Burke to secretary of defense, July 10, 1958 (top secret), Central Files, reel 3.
20. Memorandum of discussion at the 396th meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, D.C., February 12, 1959 (top secret, eyes only), FRUS, 397–98.
21. Memorandum of discussion of the 429th meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, D.C., December 16, 1959, FRUS, 705.
22. Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Warner, 1979), 416.
23. Luxenberg, “Did Eisenhower Push Castro,” 47–49.
24. Welch, Response to Revolution, 48.
25. Morley, Imperial State, 75–76.
26. Memorandum of conversation, Washington, D.C., March 12, 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 424–28.
27. William Appleman Williams, The United States, Cuba, and Castro: An Essay on the Dynamics of Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962), 39.
28. Tad Szulc and Karl E. Meyer, The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster (New York: Ballantine, 1962), 35.
29. On May 3, 1960, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee went even further and held a hearing featuring former Batista army officers, including the former chief of staff and the onetime commander of the military prison whom Batista had removed from office after the prisoners protested inhumane treatment.
30. Welch, Response to Revolution, 114.
31. I thank an anonymous reader for the University of North Carolina Press for bringing this fact to my attention.
32. Williams, United States, Cuba, and Castro, 127.
33. Morley, Imperial State, 83.
34. Harry R. Turkel, memorandum, Washington, D.C., July 1, 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 546–51.
35. Jules R. Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 188.
36. For a discussion of the U.S. sugar quota, see chap. 1.
37. Memorandum of a conversation, Washington, D.C., June 1, 1959 (official use only), FRUS, 517–19.
38. Welch, Response to Revolution, 106.
39. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to Christian A. Herter, October 30, November 12, 1959, Herter to Lloyd, November 4, 17, 1959, FRUS, 647–48, 653–56, 663–65, 669–71.
40. Benjamin, United States, 188–89.
41. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs’ Special Assistant John C. Hill to R. R. Rubottom, Washington, D.C., December 10, 1959 (secret), FRUS, 697–98.
42. Department of State memorandum of telephone conversation between General Nathan B. Twining and Livingston T. Merchant, December 29, 1959 (official use only), Central Files, reel 7.
43. Benjamin, United States, 189.
44. Memorandum of a conference with the president, Washington, D.C., February 17, 1960, attended by General Andrew Goodpaster and Gordon Gray, special assistant to the president for national security affairs (top secret), FRUS, 789–90.
45. “A Program of Covert Action against the Castro Regime,” paper prepared by the 5412 Committee, Washington, D.C., March 16, 1960 (secret, eyes only), FRUS, 850–51.
46. Benjamin, United States, 189.
47. Morley, Imperial State, 88.
48. Philip Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 149–50.
49. Ibid., 151.
50. Morley, Imperial State, 122.
51. Welch, Response to Revolution, 57–58.
52. Ibid., 77–79.
53. Dwight Eisenhower to Christian A. Herter, June 27, 1959, R. R. Rubottom to Herter (confidential), July 2, 1959, Herter to Eisenhower, July 7, 1959, concerning recommendations by Robert Kleberg, Central Files, reel 6; memorandum of conversation between Lawrence Crosby and Rubottom and R. A. Stevens, June 29, 1959 (limited official use), Central Files, reel 6.
54. Statement of United States Inter-American Council, June 2, 1959, William F. Combs, executive director of United States Inter-American Council, to Christian A. Herter, July 1, 1959, R. R. Rubottom to Combs, October 2, 1959, Central Files, reel 17.
55. Department of State memorandum of telephone conversation between Harold S. Geneen and R. R. Rubottom, December 14, 1959 (official use only), Central Files, reel 7.
56. Department of State memorandum of conversation between Al Nehmer, consultant on sugar to bottlers, bakers, and confectioners, and Jean H. Mulliken, November 30, 1959 (official use only), Central Files, reel 18.
57. U.S. Embassy in Cuba to Department of State (telegram), December 2, 1958 (secret), FRUS, 276–77.
58. U.S. Embassy in Cuba to Department of State (telegram), January 6, 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 345–46.
59. Robert A. Stevenson to R. R. Rubottom, December 17, 1959 (official use only), Central Files, reel 18. A similar concern that particular U.S. business interests in Cuba might be sacrificed in the pursuit of larger policy goals was expressed by Eugene LeBaron, vice president of International Telephone and Telegraph, when U.S. financial assistance to Cuba was considered during a brief moment when an agreement was thought possible between the two countries. LeBaron objected to the United States providing aid to Cuba in light of the fact that his company had been negatively affected by Cuban government policies (Department of State memorandum of conversation between LeBaron and William Snow, August 7, 1959 [official use only], Central Files, reel 15).
60. Morley, Imperial State, 82.
61. Department of State to U.S. Embassy in Cuba (telegram), May 22, 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 510–11.
62. Department of State memorandum of conversation, Washington, D.C., September 24, 1959 (limited official use), FRUS, 605–11.
63. Department of State memorandum of conversation between Lawrence Crosby and R. R. Rubottom and R. A. Stevenson, June 29, 1959 (limited official use), Central Files, reel 6.
64. Department of State memorandum of conversation, Washington, D.C., September 24, 1959, FRUS, 605–11.
65. Department of State memorandum of conversation, Washington, D.C., June 30, 1960 (secret), FRUS, 973–75.
66. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso, 1993), 216–22.
67. Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 225.
68. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 216–22.
69. Williams, United States, Cuba, and Castro, 158.
70. Welch, Response to Revolution, 167–68.
71. Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 67–81, 118–19.
72. Welch, Response to Revolution, 161.
73. It is important to distinguish between these early executions of Batista henchmen and the later use of executions as the maximum penalty for common and “counterrevolutionary” political crimes.
74. Szulc and Meyer, Cuban Invasion, 32.
75. Ibid., 33.
76. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
77. For an analysis that stresses the importance of the “long arm” of U.S. power and influence in Cuba and Latin America and its impact on Cuban revolutionary developments, see Jorge Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 1–133; Jorge Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8–133.
78. Here I disagree with Morley’s assertion (Imperial State, 128–29) that there was no such thing as a moderate U.S. government position vis-à-vis Cuba, although I agree with his overall thesis of U.S. hostility to authentic revolutionary change, which includes the position taken by moderates such as Bonsal.
79. While discussing the early period of the revolution, Morley described the U.S. officials’ overt hostility to “the Castro faction” of the Cuban government, thus failing to note the clear distinction that the U.S. government (as well as many other people) made between Raúl Castro and Che Guevara on one hand and Fidel Castro on the other; see Morley, Imperial State, 128.
80. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States, 39, 61.
81. U.S. Embassy in Cuba to Department of State (telegram), May 6, 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 503–4.
82. Memorandum of discussion at the 400th meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, D.C., March 26, 1959 (top secret), FRUS, 440–42.
83. U.S. Embassy in Cuba to Department of State (telegram), April 14, 1959 (secret), FRUS, 456–57.
84. Philip Bonsal to R. R. Rubottom, September 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 615.
85. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States, 41–42.
86. Ibid., 41.
87. For a useful and detailed account of the U.S. military embargo policy vis-à-vis Cuba, see Paterson, Contesting Castro, 59, 135–37, 159, 174, 187.
88. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States, 98.
89. Ibid., 99.
90. U.S. Embassy in Cuba to Department of State (telegram), July 31, 1959 (secret), FRUS, 578.
91. Department of State to Philip Bonsal (telegram), August 1, 1959 (secret), Central Files, reel 25.
92. U.S. Embassy in Cuba to Department of State, March 9, 1959 (confidential), FRUS, 421–24.
93. Ibid., 469–70.
94. Morley, Imperial State, 78–80.
95. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States, 42.
96. Ibid., 135, 156.
97. Ibid., 160.
98. Ibid., 161.
99. Robert Alexander, Bolivia: Past, Present, and Future of Its Politics (New York: Praeger, 1982), 80–81; James M. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), ix.
100. Malloy, Bolivia, 95–110.
101. Ibid., 115–16, 144, 149; James M. Malloy, “Revolutionary Politics,” in Beyond the Revolution: Bolivia since 1952, ed. James M. Malloy and Richard S. Thorn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 112–18.
102. Malloy, Bolivia, 219–20.
103. Ibid., 164, 211, 214, 240, 334.
104. Ibid., 149, 216–35.
105. Alexander, Bolivia, 93.
106. Malloy, Bolivia, 172–75.
107. Cole Blasier, “The United States and the Revolution,” in Beyond the Revolution, ed. Malloy and Thorn, 100.
108. Ibid., 63.
109. Ibid., 64.
110. Ibid., 65.
111. Alexander, Bolivia, 93.
112. Ibid., 98; James W. Wilkie, The Bolivian Revolution and U.S. Aid since 1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 8.
113. James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggles in Bolivia, 1952–1982 (London: Verso, 1984), 113.
114. Blasier, “United States and the Revolution,” 80–82.
115. Dunkerley, Rebellion, 105.
116. Ibid., 106.
117. Ibid., 108–11.
118. Malloy, Bolivia, 179–82; Blasier, “United States and the Revolution,” 93.
119. Blasier, “United States and the Revolution,” 93–94.
120. Alexander, Bolivia, 94.
121. Blasier, “United States and the Revolution,” 94–95.
1. Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 127.
2. On the basis of a study conducted in the archives of the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Institute of Agrarian Reform), Juan and Verena Martínez Alier conclude that the rural working class demanded land or work, thus creating a great deal of class pressure on the revolutionary government and bringing about its radicalization. Although it is plausible that the rural workers demanded land or work, it is impossible to assess how representative these cases were of the rural proletariat, particularly if we make the reasonable assumption that only the most discontented would complain to the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria. A more important objection is that, again, the researchers did not say anything about whether the rural complainants were demonstrating impatience with, discontent with, or distrust of the Cuban government’s policies and actions; see Juan Martínez Alier and Verena Martínez Alier, “‘Tierra ó Trabajo’: Notas Sobre el Campesinado y la Reforma Agraria, 1959–1960,” in Cuba: Economía y Sociedad (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1972), 109–208.
3. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 18.
4. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Ernesto Guevara También Conocido como el Che (Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1996), 354.
5. I am using the term “hegemony” in the sense given to it by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. John M. Cammett, a Gramsci scholar, describes hegemony as “the ‘spontaneous’ loyalty that any dominant social group obtains from the masses by virtue of its social and intellectual prestige and its supposedly superior function in the world of production” (Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967], 204).
6. For a more elaborate discussion of these issues, see Samuel Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960: A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 16–27.
7. Ibid., esp. 235–37.
8. Herbert Matthews, Fidel Castro (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 112.
9. Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 51.
10. Ibid., 105.
11. Ibid., 173.
12. Farber, Revolution and Reaction, 72–77, 168–72.
13. For a translation of this letter, see Rolando Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés, eds., Revolutionary Struggle, 1947–1958, vol. 1 of The Selected Works of Fidel Castro (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 351–63. For a more detailed discussion of this incident, see Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 63–71.
14. Farber, Revolution and Reaction, 198–99, 203.
15. This analysis resembles that of James O’Connor, a U.S. economist sympathetic to the Castro regime, in “On Cuban Political Economy,” Political Science Quarterly 79 (June 1964): 233–47.
16. Fidel Castro, Discursos Para la Historia, books 1–2 (Havana: Imprenta Emilio Gall, 1959), 137.
17. Marcelo Fernández, “Zona Rebelde,” Revolución (Havana), February 16, 1959, 1.
18. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 72–73.
19. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 33–34.
20. Alfred Padula, “Financing Castro’s Revolution, 1956–1958,” Revista/Review Interamericana 8 (Summer 1978): 234–46.
21. Taibo, Ernesto Guevara, 354.
22. K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), 466–76.
23. Farber, Revolution and Reaction, 28–92.
24. Ibid., 156–61.
25. Fidel Castro, My Early Years, ed. Deborah Shnookal and Pedro Alvarez Tabío (Melbourne, Aus.: Ocean Press, 1998), 81.
26. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, “Reflexiones ante un Aniversario,” Hoy, July 29, 1959, 1.
27. Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
28. Carlos Alberto Montaner, Cuba: Claves para una Conciencia en Crisis (Madrid: Biblioteca Cubana Contemporánea, Editorial Playor, 1982).
29. The movements of the 1960s made an important contribution to Left politics by suggesting that no “Chinese wall” separates the personal from the political and that issues arising in one of these areas are relevant to the other. Nevertheless, this important insight was sometimes converted or perverted into the idea that political priorities do not exist and that every issue is, by definition, as important as everything else. Thus, the essence of politics and morality (which is about choices and priorities) is thereby abolished.
30. “Proclama del Escambray,” in Enrique Rodríguez Loeches, Bajando del Escambray (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982), 189.
31. Buró Obrero del II Frente Oriental, “Frank País,” in Unidad y Acción (Havana: Ediciones Verde Olivo, 1999), 55.
32. Farber, Revolution and Reaction, 215.
33. See Felipe Pazos, “Comentarios a dos Artículos sobre la Revolución Cubana,” El Trimestre Económico (Mexico City), 29 (January–March 1962): 1–18.
34. Farber, Revolution and Reaction, 219.
35. For example, in a sensitively written article, Carlos Luis casts serious doubt on the veracity of Castro’s charges that bombings by U.S.-based planes, rather than Cuban antiaircraft fire, had caused a number of civilian casualties in an important episode that took place in October 1959; see Carlos Luis, “Notes of a Cuban Revolutionary in Exile,” New Politics 2 (Fall 1963): 143–47.
1. Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1966).
2. Jerry F. Hough, The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1986), 226–27.
3. Harry Gelman, “The Soviet Union in the Less Developed World: A Retrospective View and Prognosis,” in The Soviet Union and the Third World: The Last Three Decades, ed. Andrzej Korbonski and Francis Fukuyama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 276.
4. Carol R. Saivetz and Sylvia Woodby, Soviet–Third World Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1985), 23–25.
5. Ibid., 25.
6. Joseph S. Berliner, Soviet Economic Aid: The New Aid and Trade Policy in Underdeveloped Countries (New York: Praeger, 1958), 14.
7. Hough, Struggle, 227.
8. Karen Dawisha, Soviet Foreign Policy towards Egypt (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979).
9. Francis Fukuyama, “Soviet Strategy in the Third World,” in Soviet Union, ed. Korbonski and Fukuyama, 26.
10. By the early 1960s, the Soviet Union had also begun to institutionalize the study of the Third World. Thus, the Institute of Africa and the Institute of Latin America were created in 1960 and 1961, respectively (Hough, Struggle, 37).
11. Fukuyama, “Soviet Strategy,” 26–27.
12. Edward González, “The Cuban Revolution and the Soviet Union, 1959–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1966), 52; Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution, Cuban Communist Appeals, and the Soviet Response,” World Politics 21 (October 1968): 47n.
13. Wayne Smith, ed., The Russians Aren’t Coming: New Soviet Policy in Latin America (Boulder: Rienner, 1992), 2; see also Robert Alexander, Communism in Latin America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957).
14. Wayne Smith, Russians Aren’t Coming, 5.
15. Ibid., 7.
16. Ibid., 8.
17. For a detailed account of the Guatemalan events, see Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Herbert S. Dinerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), chap. 1.
18. Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 24.
19. Dinerstein, Making of a Missile Crisis, 1.
20. Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 45–46.
21. Roger Phillip Hamburg, “The Soviet Union and Latin America, 1953–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1965), 109–10.
22. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 77. However, as Dinerstein pointed out (Making of a Missile Crisis, 55–56), it eventually became evident that the fear of a missile gap was unfounded, the Soviet attainment of rough parity in strategic weapons did not dramatically alter the balance of power, the Soviet economy began to decline, and the Communist world was about to splinter irremediably.
23. Hough, Struggle, 120.
24. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 402.
25. Dinerstein, Making of a Missile Crisis, 113.
26. Hough, Struggle, 120.
27. Jean Lacouture, Nasser: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1973), 230–35, 244.
28. Hough, Struggle, 120.
29. At about the same time as Khrushchev’s visit to Washington, the PSP leaders were cultivating the Chinese to increase the Cuban party’s leverage with Moscow (Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution,” 54–55).
30. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 492. Khrushchev’s recollections in this context are generally supported by the existing literature.
31. Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 246.
32. Ibid., 250.
33. Yuri Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 1959–1961 (Miami, Fla.: University of Miami North-South Center, 1994), 4.
34. See, for example, the conspiratorial interpretations put forward by Tad Szulc in Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: Morrow, 1986), chap. 3.
35. Taubman, Khrushchev, 492.
36. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 488.
37. Ibid., 489.
38. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 12.
39. Ibid., 13.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 11–12.
42. Ibid., 13.
43. Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution,” 46–47.
44. Cited in Jacques Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution: Soviet Ideological and Strategical Perspectives, 1959–1977, trans. Deanna Drendel Leboeuf (New York: Praeger, 1978), 11.
45. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 23–24; Taubman, Khrushchev, 532.
46. Cited in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 181.
47. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 28–29.
48. Ibid., 33–34.
49. Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 621–23.
50. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 63.
51. Cited in Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 570.
52. Lévesque, USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 12; Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 573.
53. At this time, Alekseev did not have access to direct and secure communications with Moscow (Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” 35, 361).
54. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 489.
55. Lévesque, USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 16–17.
56. Ibid., 15–18, 21.
57. Andrés Suárez, Cuba: Castroism and Communism, 1959–1966, trans. Joel Carmichael and Ernst Halperin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 107.
58. Lévesque, USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 21–22.
59. Ibid., 24; Saivetz and Woodby, Soviet–Third World Relations, 9.
60. Hough, Struggle, 232.
61. Dawisha, Soviet Foreign Policy, 151–65.
62. Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 438–59.
63. Cited in Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 446.
64. Lévesque, USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 51.
65. Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution,” 48.
66. Comrade Marín (Cuba), “Report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International,” International Press Correspondence 15 (October 10, 1935): 1301.
67. Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898–1958, trans. Marjorie Moore (Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1998), 170.
68. C. Fred Judson, Cuba and the Revolutionary Myth: The Political Education of the Rebel Army, 1953–1963 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984), 213.
69. Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove, 1997), 297.
70. For analyses of the political role of intellectuals in prerevolutionary Cuba, see Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Hacia una Intelectualidad Revolucionaria en Cuba,” and Ambrosio Fornet, “Revaluaciones del Movimiento Cultural del 30,” in Casa de las Americas 7 (January–February 1967).
71. For a fuller discussion of this matter, see Samuel Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960: A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), chaps. 7, 8.
72. Traditional, union-oriented social democracy was never a significant force in Cuba. Anarchism had been important until the 1920s but declined sharply thereafter. Trotskyism had some influence during the 1930s, but most of its adherents eventually merged and disappeared into the populist Auténticos in the late 1930s. By the time of the 1959 revolution, Cuban Trotskyism had been reduced to a little-known, tiny sect (Robert Alexander, Trotskyism in Latin America [Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1973], 215–35).
73. For a good rendition of this mood, see C. Wright Mills, Listen Yankee (New York: Ballantine, 1960); see also Granma, “Hechos, No Palabras,” Revolución (Havana), May 16, 1959; Cesar Leante, “Tiene la Revolución Cubana una Ideología,” Revolución (Havana), September 2, 1959.
74. La Solución Que Conviene a Cuba (Havana: Partido Socialista Popular, 1958). This fifteen-page mimeographed pamphlet was produced clandestinely; a copy is held by the New York Public Library.
75. Blas Roca, “Qué Clase de Revolución Es Ésta?” Hoy, April 11, 1959, 1.
76. Blas Roca, continuation of report to PSP January Plenum, published in Hoy, January 28, 1959, 1.
77. Hoy, January 27, 1959, 1.
78. Roca, “Qué Clase de Revolución,” 1.
79. Blas Roca, “Informa Blas Roca ante el Pleno del Comité Nacional del Partido Socialista Popular sobre el Programa del PSP,” Hoy, October 7, 1959, 1.
80. Aníbal Escalante, “El Marxismo-Leninismo y la Revolución Cubana,” Hoy Domingo (Sunday supplement), April 10, 1959.
81. Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution,” 60.
82. Quoted in Suárez, Cuba, 101.
83. This observation holds true for even the PSP’s most important theoretical documents. See, for example, Blas Roca on socialismo in his Fundamentos del Socialismo en Cuba, rev. ed. (Havana: Imprenta Nacional de Cuba, 1961).
84. See, for example, Raúl Valdés Vivó, “En el Frente de las Ideas,” Hoy, April 19, 1959, 1.
85. Argos, “Con Cien Ojos,” Hoy, June 19, 1959, 1, criticized Minister of Labor Manuel Fernández for saying that the class struggle had been laid off (cesante). A couple of weeks later, Argos criticized Nasser for saying that classes could coexist even as nations could coexist (Hoy, July 5, 1959, 2).
86. Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution,” 45.
87. Valdés Vivó, “En el Frente,” 1.
88. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, “Los Industriales, los Obreros, y la Revolución,” Hoy, December 10, 1959, 1.
89. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, “Unidad Revolucionaria, Unidad Popular, y Lucha de Clases,” Hoy, May 24, 1959, 1.
90. Ibid. See also Blas Roca, “Consideraciones sobre lo Dicho por Aguilar León,” Hoy, July 8, 1959, 1; Roca, “Informa,” 1.
91. Roca, “Consideraciones,” 1.
92. See, for example, “Llamamiento del Partido Socialista Popular al Iero de Mayo,” Hoy, April 28, 1960, 1; Blas Roca, “Bases y Fundamentos de la Alianza Obrero-Campesina,” Hoy, June 26, 1960, 1.
93. See, for example, the report of a televised interview with Blas Roca, Hoy, May 8, 1959, 8.
94. See, for example, Lázaro Peña’s comments on Ursinio Rojas’s report on “La Lucha por la Unión Obrera y la Democracia Sindical,” at the May 1959 PSP plenum in “Terminó la Reunión del Comité Ejecutivo Nacional del PSP,” Hoy, May 27, 1959, 1.
95. This ambition was the context of the first major dispute between Aníbal Escalante and Fidel Castro in 1962; see Maurice Halperin, The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro: An Essay in Contemporary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 149–59.
96. Anderson, Che Guevara, 296–97.
97. See, for example, the report of the May Day celebrations in “La Unidad Fue el Centro de los Discursos del Primero de Mayo,” Hoy, May 3, 1959. Montseny and Gálvez gave “prounity” speeches in Santa Clara, and on the same day, Raúl Castro and Guevara gave “prounity” speeches in Havana and Santiago de Cuba.
98. For a listing of some of the unions under “unity” leadership, see the account of the labor rally at Parque Trillo in Havana during the summer of 1959 in “Denunció Jesús Soto el Mujalismo Que Aún Perdura en el Movimiento Obrero: Mitin en Parque Trillo,” Hoy, July 16, 1959, 1.
99. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez revealed that Major Guillermo Jiménez of the Directorio Revolucionario consulted with him for political orientation and that Major Faure Chomón, also from the Directorio, studied Marxist texts with PSP leader Raul Valdés Vivó (cited in Maurice Halperin, The Taming of Fidel Castro [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981], 53).
100. For a very detailed although sometimes speculative account of political differences within the PSP, see Suárez, Cuba.
101. Escalante elaborated the exceptionalist thesis, maintaining that the Cuban Revolution had not taken the classical road but had developed first in the countryside and ultimately surrounded the cities. Escalante claimed that the PSP had assisted this process and helped open the way for the “Chinese road.” He concluded that the party should recruit aggressively and even usher these recruits toward positions of leadership (Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 343–46).
102. Edward González, “Castro’s Revolution,” 67.
103. See, for example, the indirect and strange polemic between Raúl Castro and Guevara with various 26th of July Movement leaders after May 1, 1959. At the May Day rallies, Raúl Castro and Guevara called for “unity” and attacked those opposed to it; in response, all of the 26th of July Movement’s provincial coordinators except Oriente’s published statements in Revolución arguing for “unity from below” and against “unity from above.” Neither side identified those being criticized. See Revolución (Havana), May 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 1959.
104. Euclides Vázquez Candela, “Saldo de una Polémica,” Revolución (Havana), September 14, 1959, 1.
105. Edward González, “Cuban Revolution,” 309.
106. Ibid., 602.
1. For an in-depth discussion of this issue, see Samuel Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1930–1960: A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976).
2. I am indebted to an anonymous reader for the University of North Carolina Press for raising many of the issues addressed in this epilogue.
3. See, for example, Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Horst Fabian, “Analogies between East European Socialist Regimes and Cuba: Scenarios for the Future,” in Cuba after the Cold War, ed. Carmelo Mesa-Lago (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993); Mark Falcoff, Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro’s Legacy (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2003); and the many volumes of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy’s Cuba in Transition (Miami, Fla.: Florida International University, 1992– ).
4. The case of the former Soviet Union is instructive in this context. The collapse of Communism in 1991 greatly accentuated the already existing disillusionment and disenchantment with revolution in general and the Bolshevik Revolution in particular; see, for example, Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). In addition, former Russian Communists violently turned against Lenin with the same vulgarity with which they had previously defended him. See Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, trans. and ed. Harold Shukman (New York: Free Press, 1994).
5. See, for example, the collection of articles “Homenaje a la República” [Homage to the Republic], Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Madrid) 24 (Spring 2002): 5–151.