The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered

The Origins of  the Cuban Revolution

RECONSIDERED

ENVISIONING CUBA

LOUIS A . PÉREZ JR., EDITOR

The Origins of  the Cuban Revolution

RECONSIDERED

Samuel Farber

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2006 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farber, Samuel, 1939–

The origins of the Cuban Revolution reconsidered / by Samuel Farber.

p. cm.—(Envisioning Cuba)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3001-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-3001-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-5673-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-5673-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Cuba—Politics and government—1959–2. Cuba—History—Revolution, 1959—Causes. 3. United States—Foreign relations—20th century. 4. United States—Relations—Cuba. 5. Cuba—Relations—United States.

I. Title. II. Series. F1788.F328 2006

972.9106′4—dc22

2005020671

Portions of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in The Cuban Communists in the Early Stages of the Cuban Revolution: Revolutionaries or Reformists?, Latin American Research Review 18, no. 1 (March 1983): 59–83, copyright © 1983 by the University of Texas Press, all rights reserved; and Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960: A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), and are reproduced here with permission of the publishers.

cloth 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

paper 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHRONOLOGY: MAJOR EVENTS IN CUBAN HISTORY, 1868–1961

INTRODUCTION

ONE

The Prerevolutionary Economy: Progress or Stagnation?

TWO

Fidel Castro and the Cuban Populist Tradition

THREE

U.S. Policy and the Cuban Revolution

FOUR

The Driving Force of the Cuban Revolution: From Above or From Below?

FIVE

The Role of the Soviet Union and the Cuban Communists

EPILOGUE

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Professor Sherry Warman and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department of the Brooklyn College Library for their valuable assistance in obtaining the materials necessary for my research. I also thank the Professional Staff Congress (American Federation of Teachers Local #2334) and the City University of New York for a PSC-CUNY Award for release time from teaching that helped me to finish this project.

I owe special gratitude to a number of people who have criticized and commented on partial and complete drafts of the manuscript while it was in preparation: César Ayala, Mel Bienenfeld, Adolfo Gilly, Dan Labotz, Corey Robin, and Francisco Sobrino. I owe special thanks to Thomas Harrison, whose editorial assistance played an important role in the development of this project.

I am deeply indebted to an anonymous reader for the University of North Carolina Press who provided me with very valuable criticisms and insightful comments. Professor Louis A. Pérez Jr. read my entire manuscript as a reader and adviser to the University of North Carolina Press and made numerous penetrating and useful criticisms. He also made himself available for several very helpful telephone consultations. I thank him for his generosity and graciousness. I am solely responsible for the views expressed in this book.

This project could not have been carried out without the invaluable and unstinting editorial guidance and support of Elaine Maisner, senior editor at the University of North Carolina Press. I thank her warmly. I am thankful as well to Ellen Goldlust-Gingrich and Ron Maner, respectively copyeditor and project editor for this book.

I give special thanks to my stepson, Daniel Marks, for his technical help in preparing this manuscript for publication. To my wife, Selma Marks, I owe eternal gratitude not only for her detailed criticisms but also for her limitless support, patience, and endurance.

Chronology

Major Events in Cuban History, 1868–1961

1868–98 Cubans wage war against Spain during most of this period. 1898 Battleship Maine explodes in Havana harbor, and the United States declares war on Spain. Subsequent peace treaty makes Cuba a U.S. protectorate. 1901 Platt Amendment is attached to the Cuban constitution, granting the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs. 1902 Cuba is officially declared independent, although Platt Amendment restrictions on its sovereignty remain. 1903 United States and Cuba ratify and enact reciprocal trade agreement. 1906–9 United States intervenes in Cuba (second time). 1917–22 United States intervenes in Cuba (third time). 1925–33 Gerardo Machado rules as dictator. 1933 Machado dictatorship is overthrown on August 12. On September 4, Sergeant Fulgencio Batista leads revolt with the support of civilian revolutionaries. Ramón Grau San Martín becomes provisional president. U.S. government, which had been actively intervening in Cuban politics both before and after Machado’s overthrow, does not recognize Grau government. 1934 Batista, with U.S. support, removes Grau’s nationalist government. Platt Amendment is officially abolished, although United States retains in perpetuity a naval base in Guantánamo Bay. Cuba and the United States sign new reciprocal trade agreement. 1934–40 Batista, as head of the army, controls Cuba through puppet governments. 1940 New Cuban constitution is adopted. 1940–44 Batista rules Cuba as constitutional president. 1944–48 Grau, leader of the Auténtico Party, serves as president. 1948–52 Auténtico leader Carlos Prío Socarrás succeeds Grau as president. March 10, 1952 Batista overthrows Prío in military coup. July 26, 1953 Attack on Moncada barracks fails, and the Castro brothers and many followers are imprisoned. May 15, 1955 Batista decrees political amnesty, and the Castro brothers, their followers, and other political prisoners are released from prison. December 2, 1956 The Granma lands in Oriente Province, bringing Fidel Castro and his followers from Mexico. March 13, 1957 Attack on Presidential Palace by Directorio Revolucionario fails. April 9, 1958 General strike fails. July 1958 Batista army offensive against rebels in Oriente Province fails. January 1, 1959 Batista flees Cuba, and 26th of July Movement rebels take over. May 1959 Agrarian reform law is enacted. October 1, 1959 Unofficial Soviet envoy Aleksandr Alekseev arrives in Cuba to establish direct link between the Soviet Union and Cuban government. February 4, 1960 Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan arrives in Cuba and signs trade treaty with Cuban government. March 1960 U.S. government adopts systematic covert action plans to overthrow Cuban government. Plans had been in preparation since late 1959. May 1960 Fidel Castro achieves complete control of Cuban press and mass media. Soviet Union and Cuba resume full diplomatic relations. June–July 1960 U.S.-owned oil companies refuse to process Soviet oil and are then expropriated by Cuban government. Dwight D. Eisenhower abrogates Cuban sugar quota. August 1960 Castro undertakes large-scale expropriation of U.S.-owned property in Cuba. October 1960 Full-scale U.S. economic blockade of Cuba begins. Cuban government carries out large-scale expropriation of Cuban capitalists. January 1961 United States breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba. April 15, 1961 U.S. government organizes bombing of Cuban airfields. April 16, 1961 Fidel Castro declares socialist character of Cuban Revolution. April 17, 1961 U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba fails after a few days of fighting in central Cuba.

The Origins of  the Cuban Revolution

RECONSIDERED

Introduction

Almost half a century after its triumph, the rapid evolution of the Cuban Revolution from a multiclass antidictatorial political movement to socialist revolution, as Fidel Castro officially declared in April 1961, remains a puzzle. Why did it occur? What was the revolution’s true character? Experts, observers, and even those intimately involved have put forth conflicting answers.

This is an opportune time to reassess the course taken by the Cuban Revolution. The inevitable passing of Fidel Castro from the scene is likely to open a substantial process of change in Cuban Communism as it is presently constituted. That process in turn will foster a need for ideological legitimation and encourage a reexamination of Cuban history, particularly the history of the revolution. The various ideological and political currents contending for hegemony in the Cuban transition are certain to find an echo in the differing historical interpretations of the Cuban Revolution that are likely to emerge. A variety of existing trends will feed these currents: the ideological change if not deterioration that the Castro regime has experienced since the early 1990s; the growth of Cuban neoliberal economic thought, which has found an echo in such places as the publications of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, headquartered in Washington, D.C.; and the Cuban hard Right’s longstanding tendency to praise if not idealize the prerevolutionary Cuban republic, a tendency that is now being echoed by newer center to center-right publications such as the influential Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana.¹ The alternative perspective presented in this work of historical synthesis will challenge the conventional views common among both supporters and opponents of the present Cuban government and will contribute to a broad discussion and reevaluation of Cuba’s recent history.²

This reassessment has been stimulated and greatly facilitated by new information that has recently become available. This includes the U.S. government’s release of previously classified documents from its Cuba archives. Most important for my purposes are the edited volume published by the U.S. State Department in 1991³ and the primary materials contained in the Confidential State Department Central Files for the years 1955 to 1959 made available by University Publications of America.⁴ Historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali have analyzed Communist Party and government documents relevant to Cuba that had been previously classified by the Soviet authorities.⁵ At the same time, a growing biographical and narrative literature has been published in Cuba, illuminating the ideas, activities, and background of revolutionary leaders and activists.⁶

One of the most important claims made by observers of the Cuban Revolution, particularly those on the liberal Left, is that the policies pursued by the Eisenhower and Kennedy Cold War administrations pushed Fidel Castro and his government into the arms of the Soviet Union and Communism. This still widely held view of the Cuban road to Communism makes two critical assumptions: that the United States could have adopted alternative policies and that the revolutionary leaders were merely reacting to U.S. policies regarding the Cuban Revolution. The reexamination of this matter raises important questions regarding Cuban and U.S. history and broader issues pertaining to the weight of politics and ideology compared to objective socioeconomic factors.

While it is conceivable that the United States could have adopted alternative policies, the United States related to Cuba as it did to other Latin American countries. U.S. policies were consistent with the preservation of Cuba’s subordinate relationship to the United States. The U.S. government pursued a clear set of interests in Latin America and limited what it would tolerate. For those who claim that the United States could have acted in a substantially different way toward the Cuban Revolution, U.S. support for the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 provides a revealing comparison, posing the important question of what price the Bolivian Revolution had to pay in exchange for U.S. support. Declassified State Department documents also provide an opportunity to analyze the roles played by U.S. investors and the U.S. government in responding to the Cuban government and illuminate the decision-making power of the State Department relative to other federal agencies, such as the National Security Council, as the relations between Cuba and the U.S. became polarized and headed toward confrontation.

While conservatives argue that the Soviet Union and the old pro-Moscow Partido Socialista Popular (PSP, the Cuban Communist Party) infiltrated and played a subversive role in the Cuban Revolution, many leftists contend that these forces were reluctant, timid reformist supporters if not sclerotic opponents of a radical Cuban revolution. Against both views, I argue first that the Soviet Union pursued the logic of state interests both in Cuba and elsewhere and second that the leftist dichotomy between reform and revolution is an inappropriate tool for understanding Soviet international behavior.

When Fulgencio Batista fell, the Soviet Union did not consider Cuba a high priority because it ascribed little importance to Latin America and considered the region part of the U.S. sphere of influence. The 1954 overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala merely reinforced this view.⁷ Although the Soviet Union did not initially have any great expectations about the radical potential of the Cuban Revolution, Soviet leaders took advantage of certain opportunities opened by the revolutionary process to strengthen forces friendly to their interests. Newly released information from Soviet archives shows that the Soviet Union became involved early on. For example, the Soviets decided to help organize and establish—along with Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and the old Cuban Communists—the Cuban state security organs less than four months after the revolutionary victory.⁸

The Soviet attitude toward the Cuban Revolution changed in the fall of 1959. Sensing that the revolution was beginning to move in a direction favorable to their interests, Soviet leaders pressed the Cubans to take a more radical course. The October 1959 arrival of unofficial Soviet envoy Aleksandr Alekseev marked an important point in the alliance between Castro and the Soviet Union that developed rapidly in the following year. Other more immediate factors contributed to greater Soviet involvement, including the perception, widely shared across the world, that the Soviet Union’s strength was growing in relation to that of the United States. Moreover, the conflict and competition between the Soviets and China in an increasingly polycentric international Communist movement caused support for Cuba to become an important issue. Such competition allowed Fidel Castro to retain some autonomy while committing himself to a close alliance with the Soviet Union and demanding membership in the Communist camp through the transformation of Cuban society into a one-party state with an almost totally nationalized economy. The Soviet Union, probably fearing the economic burden and political cost of an escalation of its conflict with the United States, resisted Cuba’s full incorporation into the Communist camp despite encouraging Cuba’s break with the United States. This situation highlights the Soviet Union’s incoherent or perhaps cynical strategy toward Cuba.

Similarly, the leftist dichotomy between reform and revolution is also an inappropriate tool for understanding the old Cuban Communists. The PSP kept pace with Castro’s radicalization of the revolution. From a programmatic point of view, during the first few months of 1959, the PSP was significantly more anticapitalist than was Castro. However, with the passage of the May 1959 agrarian reform law, Castro’s anticapitalism began to catch up with that of the PSP, and by the fall of 1959, the gap had closed; Castro would soon become even more anticapitalist than the PSP. But even when the PSP was tactically more cautious than Castro, it always supported his measures. The PSP also played an important role at the beginning of the revolutionary process as a kind of Cuban government lobbyist in Moscow. The PSP’s analyses, programs, and plans of action, although not at all comparable to the decisive role played by Fidel Castro, significantly contributed to the creation of a political climate that facilitated and may have influenced Castro’s choice of Communism. However, the PSP did not play a revolutionary role in the same sense that Castro did because it followed the logic of an organizational machine, seeking to attain maximum political gains at the least possible risk and expense.

The revolutionary leaders acted under serious external and internal constraints but were nevertheless autonomous agents pursuing independent ideological visions. These leaders made choices, including selecting the Communist road for the Cuban Revolution. Prerevolutionary social and political conditions facilitated the rise to power of a fairly autonomous political leadership with a great deal of freedom from internal class pressures.⁹ My analysis, with its emphasis on the agency of Cuba’s revolutionary leadership, challenges some previously held views of the revolution. Thus, my approach differs from the line of analysis that, while rejecting the notion that the Cuban Revolution resulted primarily from U.S. hostility, nevertheless views the development of Cuban Communism as a virtually automatic, predetermined response to objective economic, social, and political conditions as understood and acted upon by men whose guerrilla experience conditioned them to act as realistic revolutionaries to survive.¹⁰

The question of the relative weight of objective and ideological factors in the development of the Cuban Revolution leads to an analysis of the political and ideological milieu in which Fidel Castro and his close associates developed their politics. This version of Cuban populism remained intent on radicalizing the population while ensuring that the revolutionary process remained under the leaders’ tight control. In turn, this specific type of populism was compatible and had an elective affinity with the Soviet model of socialism adopted in the early 1960s. Thus, I also differ from those who acknowledge the agency of the Cuban revolutionary leaders but mischaracterize their politics. Some scholars, for example, have acknowledged the autonomy of Fidel Castro and his circle but have reduced the scope and specificity of the Cuban Revolution by broadly and vaguely characterizing it as radical nationalism.¹¹ The particular evolution of the Cuban Revolution shows that it differed significantly from the politics of radical nationalists in Cuba’s past as well as from radical nationalist revolutions in the Third World.

In contrast with those who see the development of the Cuban Revolution as virtually inevitable given the island’s economic, social, and political reality, the predominant view among Cuban Americans in South Florida is that Cuba did not need a radical social revolution because it was one of the four most economically developed Latin American countries in the 1950s. All it needed, in this view, was a few reforms, most of them political. Accordingly, Communism could not have developed based on internal Cuban needs and must therefore have been entirely the result of willful, even conspiratorial, actions external to the island’s natural development. In contrast with this view, many defenders of the Cuban regime, particularly abroad, have characterized the Cuba of the 1950s as a typical Third World underdeveloped country, ignoring critical distinctions about the very different levels of development that have existed within that broad category.

The Cuba of the 1950s remained far from European and North American levels of development; however, numerous measures ranked it well above Bolivia, Haiti, and other such Western Hemisphere countries. Cuba at this time constituted a classic case of uneven economic development. The contradictions of capitalist economic crisis (for example, the state regulation provoked by the economic depression of the 1930s) and the organized working class’s relative success in defending itself against the effects of such crises had brought the country to a state of economic stagnation, notwithstanding some limited economic growth that took place in the middle part of the decade. This stagnation made the revolutionary road a possibility grounded on Cuban realities that did not need to be artificially imposed on the society through conspiratorial means.

This book deals with unresolved issues and problems pertinent to the early, rapid development of the Cuban Revolution from an antidictatorial, multiclass political revolution to Communism. I have focused tightly on what I view as the key issues affecting the early years of the revolution and the preceding republican period and therefore have not discussed at length other important issues—for example, the histories of women and of race relations in Cuba.

I have organized the chapters around these questions while trying to maintain some chronological order and clarity. Chapter 1, centering mainly on developments before the revolution, discusses whether the economy could have contributed to the creation of a political climate favorable to a radical social revolution. Chapter 2 approximates an understanding of Fidel Castro’s politics by looking at the populist political background from which he emerged and which he eventually transcended. Chapter 3 analyzes the development and implementation of U.S. policy toward the revolution and the degree to which it could have differed substantially in the face of revolutionary challenge. Chapter 4 looks at developments inside Cuba during the late 1950s and in that sense provides a Cuban domestic counterpart to my analysis of U.S. policy in that critical period. Chapter 5 discusses the important role played by the Soviet Union and the old Cuban Communists in the revolutionary process. The epilogue brings together the book’s various themes and briefly reflects on the likely future context in which the topics discussed in this book will acquire a new importance as well as on the significance of the Cuban Revolution.

Chapter One

The Prerevolutionary Cuban Economy

Progress or Stagnation?

Did the economic conditions prevailing in Cuba during the 1950s encourage the development of a political climate conducive to a radical social revolution?

The incomplete and frustrated 1933 revolution took place in the midst of a world depression that severely affected the Cuban economy, but, on the eve of the 1959 revolution, the economic situation had certainly improved. Cuba then had the fourth-highest per capita income in Latin America, after Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina. Ranking thirty-first in the world by the same indicator, Cuba was wealthier than most underdeveloped countries.¹ Average per capita income is, however, not necessarily a reliable indicator of general economic development: in 1953, Cuba also ranked fourth in Latin America according to an average of twelve indexes covering such items as percentage of labor force employed in mining, manufacturing, and construction; percentage of literate persons; and per capita electric power, newsprint, and caloric food consumption.² Eugene Staley, the chief economist of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, the predecessor of the World Bank) mission that investigated the Cuban economy in 1950, classified it as part of an intermediate group of nations that fell in between the highly developed and underdeveloped groups. Staley grouped Cuba with such countries as Chile, Poland, Hungary, and Spain.³

Cuba had enjoyed significant postwar prosperity. Sugarcane producers in Asia and beet growers in Europe were only beginning to recover from war destruction and could not yet compete with Cuban sugar exports. This boom allowed liberal but corrupt president Ramón Grau San Martín (1944–48) to proclaim that during his administration every Cuban had five pesos in his pocket. (One peso was worth one dollar.) By 1950, world sugar production had recovered from the effects of the war, and postwar Cuban prosperity had come under threat. However, with the outbreak of the Korean War, sugar prices went up, thus saving Cuba from an economic downturn, although only for a few years.⁴

On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the postwar boom had merely returned the Cuban economy to the predepression days of the 1920s. Thus, as the IBRD’s 1951 Report on Cuba pointed out, Cuba’s per capita income of about three hundred dollars per year was only slightly above that of the early 1920s.⁵ Cuba’s most important economic breakthrough had taken place from 1900 to 1925, right after Spain was forced to abandon the island in 1898 and the United States made Cuba into a de facto economic and political colony. During this period, the productive basis for Cuba’s relatively high economic standing in Latin America had been established. With a U.S. capital investment in the island that amounted to $750 million by 1925,⁶ Cuba was producing seventeen times as much sugar in 1925 as in 1900. But as the Report on Cuba also explained, the Cuban economy had made relatively little progress since then.⁷

IMPERIAL DEVELOPMENT IN CUBA

While the origins of Cuba’s sugar monoculture went back to the 1790s, the entry of U.S. capital and political influence at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century marked a qualitative new stage in the island’s economy and polity. Because the U.S. sugar industry in Cuba required huge expanses of land for the cultivation of cane—with sugar companies competing with each other for the acquisition of land—the industry destroyed small and midsized landed property holdings and created a proletarianized labor force, not all of which would always find work as wage laborers in the sugar industry. The remaining small and medium-sized rural proprietors remained subject to the sugar mill owners, most of them North American, particularly if as cultivators of sugar they had to accept the prices and conditions imposed by the sugar capitalists.⁸ Much of this phenomenon resulted from the massive economic destruction that the Cuban guerrilla war against Spain—and heavy Spanish reprisals against the Cuban rebels—had created in the Cuban countryside. The undercapitalized nonsugar sector faced particularly great obstacles in recovering from this terrible experience.

Later, as the 1920 speculative bubble known as the dance of the millions was followed by the crash of the sugar market at the end of that year, Cuba’s sugar and banking sectors entered into crisis. Many sugar proprietors were unable to honor their mortgage payments and were forced to sell under very unfavorable conditions. The National City Bank took control of more than fifty sugar mills in the summer of 1921,⁹ thereby increasing overall U.S. control of Cuban sugar production.

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