An Analysis of Key Factors Leading to The Revolution
In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the ‘end of history’; his culprit for the murder of history being Western liberal democracy. The ascendency of this ideology to the status of what Mark Fisher has described as ‘alternative-less’ has everything to do with the perceived failure of ‘Actually Existing Socialism’. However, this analysis downplays the achievements of one of, if not the most successful socialist movement of all time; the Cuban Revolution. Cuba, while having depended on the USSR as a main trade partner, carries the torch of socialism into the 21st century despite the failure of the Russian project. The movement that succeeded in transforming the little impoverished and exploited island of Cuba into the perhaps last bastion of ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, known as the 26th of July movement, was not however always one of a distinctly socialist or even marxist in character. Owing much to Jose Marti who led Cuba towards independence from Spain, this movement succeeded where Marti could not; while he succeeded in leading the people of Cuba from under the foot of Spain, the American empire swooped in to claim the island which they had sights on for a long time. The 26th of July movement was able to fight off the American machine and create a self-governing polity of Cubans for the first time since pre-Columbian times. The factors leading to this success are not as simple as clandestine revolutionarianism however. Social factors, such as discrimination; economic factors, including the vast wealth divide between the haves and have-nots; and political factors, such as the denial by America to let Cuba decide their destiny themselves, describe an island with a need for a vast upheaval of the plagues of their society. The successful upheaval of these ills was led by Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement, but was enacted by a vast and diverse showing of Cubans who believed in a better future for themselves and for their children.
Cuba, as many societies, struggled with discrimination of various groups. The paramount form of discrimination in pre-revolutionary Cuba was a pervasive racism. This discrimination was inherited from their colonial history. Cuba was one of the last colonies of the western empires to have their slaves emancipated by their colonial power in 1886. Some slaves were conditionally freed earlier however.
In October 1868, in the Eastern Department of Cuba, a group led by small-scale planters, frustrated at Spain's multiple failings as a metropolitan power and provoked by economic hardship and new taxes, rose in rebellion. Some freed their own slaves and incorporated them into the rebel army, and the insurgents' platform called for the eventual indemnified emancipation of all slaves. The rebel leaders planned for this abolition to come after the triumph of the revolution, however, and in the meanwhile decreed the death penalty for anyone caught inciting slaves to revolt.
The planter class of Cuba, like in Haiti, had no intention of freeing slaves based on moral grounds. Rather they found themselves a minority on the island and needed numbers to back up their insurgency. The only way to rouse the slaves would be to offer their freedom in exchange for their participation in the rebellion. This type of bargaining did not lead necessarily to freedom for the slaves, or libertos as the Spanish called them. The Spanish, while offering freedom, held out their offer with many conditions.
[I]nsurgent administrators obliged some libertos to remain with their former masters, ordered others from place to place as forced labor, compelled libertas to work as their personal domestic servants, and made invidious distinctions within the army among whites, creole libertos, and Africans. Both wartime exigency and the class and cultural differences between officers and libertos led officers to view freed slaves as useful but dangerous and to impose controls drastically limiting their freedom.
These “invidious distinctions” portray a ruling class obsessed with difference and exclusion. The harms of these distinctions lived on in Cuba well after the system of slavery was formally abolished. Dr. Luis Alberto Clerge Fabra provides an excellent and harrowing first-hand account of the discrimination in re-revolutionary Cuba:
In the first place, racial discrimination in the country had separated the black and a good part of the mestizo population, and relegated us to a secondary role in the society in general. The way that blacks could gain access to a profession was not easy. For example, in Santiago there was only one black medical doctor, a very good cardiologist. I remember him, and I don’t remember any other. So, they did not have access because of their class, because they came from very humble [poor] parts of the population. They could not finish their studies because they had to go to work.
The dictatorship utilised a lot of that weakness...up to the year 1957, they managed to use this. When they captured a black person who was a militant, they would say, “but what are you doing with these scoundrels? These are terrorists, they’re white, you’re black. If you think they care about you, you are crazy.” but this thing exploded somewhat.
Discrimination of women was also a societal problem that the coming revolution would have to address. Similarly to racism, Cuba inherited a deeply patriarchal societal structure owing to its Spanish colonial overlord, whose Catholicism stressed the importance of a man leading the household and the subservience of women. Despite this culture of discrimination of women, the revolution relied heavily on the contributions of women and even used this discrimination to their favor. Dr. Luis Alberto Clerge Fabra again provides an invaluable account:
the young women, they incorporated themselves into the armed struggle; they went on actions with us. For example, two actions I know well were repeated often in Santiago de Cuba, because I lived there. In Havana, I imagine they had more or less equal types of actions. Well, it happened all over the island. If we were going to have an armed action, with dynamite or something like that, the young woman would hide it under her skirts, and go with her “boyfriend” to plant it. . . .
Women were able to sneak under the noses of police and government officials based on a naive assumption of their feeble and timid nature. According to Aminda Alberd’s account, this allowed for women to travel abroad to secure weaponry for the rebellion:
They went to Miami, where there were groups of the 26th who were working to find arms. In those days, the fashion was the very large skirts [with stiff petticoats underneath]. On the inside of the skirts, there were kangaroo bags, and they would carry the guns, in parts, and the bullets. For example, one time I went to pick up four young women, and three or four women had in their skirts 24 pistols – 24! And they had 72 magazines! [A 1950s magazine might have been the size of today’s clip for a handgun.]
Alminda Alberd notes that misogyny put women in a better position to smuggle weaponry:
And the role of the women, I believe, was important because the women were able to travel more easily, fool the authorities a little more, because they would never suppose we were active as revolutionaries.
This pervasive belief of women’s inability to confront the ills of society, or to even properly perceive them, unfortunately also contributed to some backwards expressions within the revolutionary movements of the time.
[W]omen were never heads of cells because, really, this society was a little machista; we [women] did the work but they tried to protect us from taking a bullet. We had other types of work that were no less risky, and over the passage of years, there was agreement on that. . . . [Today] it is possible that a woman would take a rifle and go into battle like a man, but in those days, no. No, they were not ready, not mature enough for that, a little of how we saw ourselves then.
Alberd’s statement that it is possible today for a woman to take up arms as an equal gives us both an incredible insight into the success of the revolution in lifting women to the status that men held, and shows us exactly how far they have come from a society that would not accept a woman leader.
Among other formerly Spanish societies, Cuba was unique in its lack of religious fervor after deposing the Spanish colonists. Roman Catholicism may have held a vast majority of the public’s religious beliefs with some 80% of Cubans identifying as Catholic, but only about 8% of the population actually practiced the religion. This lack of religious practice left the Catholic church without real authority within Cuban society. This impotence of the power of the Church meant that despite their historically conservative nature, they were unable to influence the Cuban population. “The Church could not hold society together or rally public opinion, either in self-interest or on behalf of the status quo.”
Some scholars have even gone as far as to claim the population of the time was broadly agnostic. This helped the population accept a revolutionary movement based on materialism. This also helps explain the acceptance of socialism to come, which opposes religious authority.
Cuban society, since the fall of Spanish rule led by Jose Marti, was a culture of rebellion. Numerous forms of protest define the 20th century in Cuba. Student and youth protest was a common occurrence and was a contributing factor in the success of the Cuban Revolution. Alminda Alberd again provides an excellent first hand account: “There was a general desire [to support the revolution] because we received in November [1958] a large number of youth who were arriving in the mountains”. This “general desire” among the Cuban population speaks to a culture of revolution, who had seen a great turmoil within their country as countless leaders came and went and robbed the country’s treasury. This culture can also be attributed to a widespread culture of revolution across the Caribbean, who had been rising up against their colonial powers for as long as these powers had held their fists over them.
One aspect of Cuban society that has been left out of many assessments of the factors leading to the revolution is the prevalence of American and international gang activity in Cuba. The years leading up to the revolution saw a huge surge in all types of American investment in Cuba.
Throughout the post–World War II years and into the 1950s, direct U.S. business investments in Cuba grew from $142 million to $952 million by the end of the decade. Such was the extent of American interest in Cuba that this island, roughly the size of the state of Tennessee, ranked in third place among the nations of the world receiving U.S. investments.
This influx of money rapidly changed parts of Cuba into tourist-friendly sites of luxury– and debauchery. It was well known that Cuba was the destination for Americans to let out their binge-drinking urges during prohibition. This was the genesis of the ‘Cuba Libre’ cocktail, rum, lime juice, and coca-cola. The most popular drinking location for these Americans was a bar known as ‘Sloppy Joe’s’, which portrays well the intentions of the American tourists who couldn't imbibe at home. Beyond the era of prohibition, Cuba maintained within the American consciousness as a place of revelry and illegal consumption.
No one can deny that upon the arrival of the Revolution in 1959, the Republic of Cuba was one of the main pillars of organized crime in all of its manifestations. Gambling, drugs and prostitution– to name the most well-known– had grown to proportions unknown in the rest of the American continent. All those who wanted to invest in these illegal businesses, as well as those who wanted to enjoy them, came to the island unhindered, aided by the goodwill and complicity of the governmental authorities of that time. For thousands of Cuban officials these activities amounted to a big business; from the bribes demanded by middle-level officials to permit these activities, to the tremendous profits garnered through the traffic of contraband by high-level representatives of the regime.
The awareness of these activities by the Cuban government is well documented, but the corruption goes much further than bribes and willful ignorance on the part of government officials. Fulgencio Batista was a willing participant in this sordid affair: “With intelligence operatives, soldiers, and secret torture squads within the police serving as his enforcers, President Batista was the muscle behind the Havana Mob.” The scope of Batista’s involvement with what has been called the ‘Havana Mob’ is profound and underscores the full and total corruption of his regime. Joseph ‘Doc’ Stacher, a member of the Havana Mob, witnessed firsthand Batista’s dealings with the gang:
Lansky and I flew to Havana with the money in suitcases and spoke to Batista, who hadn’t quite believed we could raise that kind of money . . . Lansky took Batista straight back to our hotel, opened the suitcases and pointed at the cash. Batista just stared at the money without saying a word. Then he and Meyer shook hands and Batista left. We had several meetings with him over the next week and I saw that Meyer and Batista understood each other very well. We gave Batista a guarantee of between $3 and $5 million a year, as long as we had a monopoly on the casinos at the Hotel Nacional and everywhere else on the island where we thought tourists would come. On top of that he was promised a cut of our profits.
If it weren’t for the success of the revolution, it is possible this gang would have gotten what they wanted out of Cuba: an entire country which capitulates totally to gangsters. “These mobsters had always dreamed of one day controlling their own country, a place where they could provide gambling, narcotics, booze, prostitution, and other forms of vice free from government or law enforcement intrusion.”
The influx of foreign capital throughout the first half of the 20th century, despite some of it being illicit business, was a seemingly necessary step away from a society built upon sugar. This crop had come to define Cuban society internally and externally. Following the Haitian revolution, Cuba took up the mantle of the largest provider of sugar in the region. Cuba’s output of sugar was massive; in 1925 Cuba produced 23 percent of the world’s beet and cane sugar. But Cuba excelled specifically with cane sugar. That same year, Cuba provided 36 percent of the world's cane sugar. While sugar at one time was an incredibly profitable business, mostly for those US investors mentioned above, the 20th century saw the security of sugar’s profitability waning.
[I]n the 1920s, with persistent fears of over-production, the focus of US interests shifted from the creation of new productive capacity to the absorption of a substantial number of established Cuban sugar enterprises. Large loans from US banks had financed Cuban efforts to profit from a short-lived speculative boom in world sugar prices in 1920. When it collapsed, the same banks took over defaulting Cuban producers and financiers. Moreover, many large US sugar companies in Cuba were vertically integrated with their continental processing industries, giving them a direct low-cost access to a US market denied to many of their Cuban rivals. But in 1930 prohibitive tariffs erected by the US Congress protected not only continental beet and cane producers but also the sugar exporters of the USA's insular territories of Hawaii, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. This exacerbated the devastating impact upon Cuban producers of restricted markets and shrinking prices outside the USA and inflamed a powerful nationalist movement that culminated in the Revolution of 1933.
Sugar’s dominance over the Cuban economy was not healthy for the Cuban population. While it employed much of the rural populace, dependance on the stability of a monocrop doomed the Cuban economy to suffer when price fluctuated. “[I]n its dependence on sugar, Cuban agriculture suffered from the lack of diversification, and much land was inefficiently cultivated.” On top of this lack of economic security for the Cuban population, the American investors in Cuba were the only ones who could truly benefit from a profitable yield. The American ownership of these means of production meant that the Cuban population grew to rightly see these capitalists, and the American empire broadly, as the source of their suffering.
The economic immiseration felt by the Cuban population was enhanced greatly following the Great Depression. This period saw a huge drop in tourism in Cuba which was becoming a large business and a viable alternative to the dominance of sugar in the Cuban economy. While the American economy was reinvigorated with wartime spending during the second World War, Cuba had no such economic revitalization. In the years preceding the revolution, unemployment was a serious social and economic problem. In fact, many of the protestors and revolutionaries were unemployed youth, their ability to fight for the betterment of themselves and their countrymen was in part due to their lack of stability within the workforce. The prices for sugar following the boom in 1920 never recovered to a stable or profitable level. This means that the two largest economic opportunities of the early 20th century in Cuba were devastated, leaving the Cuban economy in dire straits. In 1920 the price per pound for sugar was over 11 cents. The following year the price dropped to almost 3 and a half cents, and the year after that it was under 3 cents. The next two years saw a slight increase in price but the price of sugar never recovered anywhere close to the figures seen in 1920. The economic depression felt across the world was amplified in Cuba because of their monocrop plantations and reliance on the stability of foreign markets and price signals.
Along the same axis of foreign reliance and exploitation was the mismanagement of land in Cuba and the dominance of foreign ownership of the land. As we have seen in the quote above on page 9, American capital seized opportunities to take Cuban land to make their sugar production seamless. This left Cuba with a large amount of their land in the hands of foreigners. Sugar plantations are notoriously large by necessity and Cuba was no exception. Because of the falling price of sugar and American anxieties of overproduction, this also meant that land that was meant for sugar production was not always used. Rural Cubans who relied on temporary work on the plantations would have suffered the worst because of this mismanagement. The wealth disparity in Cuba between the Havana elites and the rural plantation workers was shocking. This tension was prime to erupt. Cubans had little hopes for owning the land they worked, especially with foreign investment funneling in. This all amounted to a drastic need for land reform, which was one of the first actions taken by the revolutionary Cuban government.
The political climate within the 20th century in Cuba was just as hostile to the impoverished masses in Cuba as the economy. The nearly 60 years preceding the Cuban revolution saw numerous presidents and military installations take power, often not lasting for long. One president was in power for only 5 days. This political turmoil amounted to a lack of faith in politics in general and distrust of political parties. Even when political parties who promised change came to power, they turned around and pilfered the public treasury for themselves and their most prominent supporters. Corruption defined politics within Cuba at every level.
“The robber-officials physically, literally, carried away money from the National Treasury. One was a Señor Alemán, who I believe was Vice minister of Education. In terms of that epoch, some US specialists calculated a fortune of 80-100 million dollars missing from the Cuban Treasury. The Cubans who had the most property in Daytona beach [Florida] were Batista and this Alemán.”
This account from Dr. Luis Alberto Clerge Fabra shows how regular Cubans watched as political elites stole from their people to benefit themselves. And the method of ruling the country was similarly criminal in nature.
Violent reprisals on Batista’s part toward any and all “subversive activity” brought about a phenomenon well known to physicists: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Political upheaval had been a staple in Cuba since the island’s nominal independence from Spain in 1898. The stench of colonialism lingered on, creating resentment, bitterness, and a strong sense of righteous indignation. Political leaders bullied their way into office and were then toppled, many of them more corrupt than those who came before. One president lasted a total of five days in office before being overthrown. Even among this cavalcade of despots, Batista achieved a new level of infamy. He had taken over the government by force, suspended the constitution, and was in the process of creating a capitalist Shangri-La in Havana. To those who opposed his fraudulent regime, the casinos, nightclubs, sex trade, and mobsterism in the capital city became a symbol of everything they despised about the plundering of Cuba by outside interests.
Any figure who came to represent the exploitation of Cuba by the American empire was seen as an enemy of the people. Batista had dealings with both the American government and the American underworld as seen in his negotiations with Meyer Lansky and “Lucky” Luciano. Beyond the corruption of Cuban leaders throughout the pre-revolutionary period, Cuba suffered under the tyrannical fist of the American empire, whose interventions in Cuban politics only served to protect American capital.
“The security of US economic, political and military interests in Cuba was guaranteed by the Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution. In force from 1902 to 1934, this obliged Cuban governments (among much else) to consent to US intervention ‘for the preservation of Cuban independence’ and ‘the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty'. Cuba thus began life in the 20th century neither as an independent Republic nor a formal colony but as a US protectorate.
With Batista, as with so many leaders propped up by the American government, the US was aware of his brutality and corruption. This was merely a side-effect deemed acceptable by the US to having a Cuban leader who was in their pocket. After all, the United States had believed in their rightful ownership of Cuba for almost as long as they had been an independent republic. This opinion is outlined in a statement made in 1829 by then Secretary of State Mr. Van Buren:
The government of the United States has always looked with the deepest interest upon the fate of those islands, but particularly upon Cuba. Its geographical position, which places it almost in sight of our southern shores, and, as it were, gives it command of the Gulf of Mexico and the West India seas, its safe and capacious harbors, its rich productions, the exchange of which for our surplus agricultural products and manufactures constitutes one of the most extensive and valuable branches of our foreign trade, render it of the utmost importance to the United States that no change should take place in Its condition which might injuriously affect our political and commercial standing in that quarter.
This last statement by Van Buren echoes the sentiments put to paper and sanctioned in law by the Platt amendment that formalized the United States’ relationship as overseer of Cuba, only expressed some 70 years earlier. It is no conspiracy to suggest that the United States has always had an interest in owning Cuba to some extent. This expression is felt in their mistreatment of Cuba today, economically, politically, and socially. The United States tends to portray Cuba as some maligned and backwards country who needs liberation, the same type of liberation they tried to bring to Iraq and Afghanistan. They have no intention of helping the Cuban population, but only a plundering of their natural resources and strategic position.
The pretense for the Cuban Revolution, as shown, is vast and diverse. The Cuban people suffered with discrimination, economic mismanagement at the hands of American exploitation, proliferation of prostitution and gambling via the Havana Mob, and decades of political leaders stealing from public money, among other societal issues. The Cuban people had not had their needs met in any sector, with unemployment and underemployment rampant, and those who did work suffered from a protracted economic depression beginning in the 1920s. The Cuban Revolution would attempt to solve these issues, much of which, despite efforts on America’s part to stifle their hopes, they did succeed in providing a new and better society for the average Cuban. The American embargo on Cuba, which began swiftly after the Revolution, has cost Cuba at least an estimated 1.1 trillion dollars. Despite continued attempts by the US to halt the progress of the revolution, such as the Bay of Pigs, or numerous attempts on Fidel Castro’s life, the Cuban Revolution was successful even against the most powerful empire in history. Cuba was able to drastically alter their history for the better of their people. Poet Nicolás Guillén reflected on this success in his poem “Tengo” from 1964, an excerpt of which, translated to english, is below:
I have, let's see, that I have learned to read, to count, I have that I have learned to write, and to think, and to laugh. I have… that now I have a place to work and earn what I have to eat. I have, let's see, I have what I had to have.