Fidel Castro
Page 11
One potentially explosive issue was the secret meetings which, within weeks of the entry into Havana, this circle had started to hold with leaders of the then 50,000-strong Socialist People’s Party. While the foot-soldiers of the left-bourgeois 26th of July Movement and the PSP were publicly venting their aversion for each other, the leading group around Castro were deciding together with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Blas Roca (PSP general secretary since 1934), and Anibal Escalante from the Party’s executive committee to work for a unification of all revolutionary groups. The way to the talks had been opened when the Communists showed themselves willing to recognize Castro as sole leader of the revolution, even though he was still not inclined to become one of the party faithful. Blas Roca later recalled how Castro once laughingly said to him: “Shit, we are the government now, and still we have to go on meeting illegally.”16 But the participants had every reason to maintain secrecy: the population at large would not find such an alliance acceptable, and at that time Castro himself was not interested in establishing a Moscowstyle system on the island and falling into a new dependence. He pursued his own middle way, a Caribbean socialism that might be ideologically defined as “Castroism.” The last thing he wanted was to give the United States a pretext for intervention.
At first Castro evidently just wanted to use the Communists; a tactical alliance with them would also allow him to neutralize and incorporate any opposition from the left. It was not necessarily a contradiction, then, but actually part of his power game, that he tried behind closed doors to link his revolutionary movement with the Communists, while in public he let others attack his future allies, or even did so himself, in order to ensure that they behaved in a disciplined manner. In late May, he was still stressing in a television interview that the revolution would be neither left nor right but “one step forward.” Its color was “not red but olive green,” like the uniforms of the rebel army.17
It was quite possible that, being without a discernible ideological commitment, Castro was at that time unsure where he would take Cuba. During a trip to the United States at the invitation of American newspaper editors, from April 15 to 26, he made much of this theme and declared with great realism: “I have said in a clear and definitive fashion that we are not Communists.… The doors are open to private investments that contribute to the industrial development of Cuba.… It is absolutely impossible for us to make progress if we do not come to an understanding with the United States.”18 Possibly, however, official Washington’s curt rejection of his revolution was already leading him to the view that it would not tolerate a nationalist middle way between capitalism and Communism.
In the first weeks and months after the victory of the revolution, the people expected one thing above all else: a settling of accounts with Batista’s paid torturers and murderers. The media were overflowing with reports about the victims of the former regime. Unimaginable instruments and practices of torture were described, together with tragedies of horrifying dimensions. Mothers and wives of the killed and missing marched through the streets demanding vengeance.
“Parédon! Parédon! Parédon!” – “Up against a wall!” – shouted several hundred thousand voices at a mass rally in Havana on January 22, 1959. Castro later told Frei Betto:
Even before the triumph of the Revolution, in the Sierra Maestra, … we drew up penal laws for punishing war crimes.… When the Revolution triumphed, the country’s courts accepted those laws as valid … and many war criminals who couldn’t escape were tried by the courts … and given severe sentences: capital punishment in some cases and prison sentences in others.19
Huge rallies were one way to channel emotions and to prevent the kind of lynchings that occurred after the fall of the Machado dictatorship in 1933; another was a show trial in Havana sports stadium of three of Batista’s worst officers. But this latter action – which, despite the evident guilt of the accused, had nothing in common with a regular trial – significantly damaged Castro’s international reputation. For, however much foreign eyes and ears had been closed to the human rights violations of the Batista dictatorship, now that the murderers’ lives were on the line the propaganda of the United States and its allies demanded humanity and mercy. One incident for which Raúl Castro was responsible had an especially powerful impact. On January 5, 1959, after summary death sentences in Santiago de Cuba, “some 70 prisoners were mowed down by rebel soldiers at the command of Raúl Castro and bulldozed under the ground without any semblance of a trial,” the new US ambassador Philip W. Bonsal indignantly noted.20
In the early days, Fidel Castro himself made a few attacks on trial procedures when the verdicts did not go as he thought they should. But he was quick to respond to criticism, and subsequently allowed trials to take their course before orderly military tribunals or revolutionary courts. Most of the death sentences were carried out in La Cabaña fortress, on the orders of Che Guevara and Raúl Castro. “The Castro procedure of setting up special tribunals to try the cases of people who, on the basis of the Nuremberg principles, were accused of serious crimes, could have been an improvement over the earlier method,” Bonsal finally conceded.21
Observers such as Tad Szulc were amazed at how little people took the law into their own hands, in comparison with the arbitrariness of human rights violations under Batista. Answering one US politician, he wrote:
Cuban revolutionary trials … bore no resemblance to the real bloodbaths that followed the Mexican, Russian and Chinese social revolutions in the twentieth century.… By the same token the Cuban revolution refrained from institutionalized mass killings such as those perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Indonesia in the aftermath of the 1965 army anti-Communist coup, or those attributable to Chilean military authorities when they overthrew the Marxist president, Salvador Allende Gossens, in 1973.… It is quite remarkable that violence-prone Cubans remained so unviolent.22
During his trip to the United States in April 1959, Castro is said to have admitted in private: “What we have to do is stop the executions.”23 At that time the US media were reporting a total of 521 since the victory of the revolution,24 and a follower of Castro, later turned opponent, estimated that by the end of the year there had been roughly 1,900.25 The leader of the revolution himself spoke of approximately 550 executed “criminals.” Carlos Franqui points to the fact that, in a countrywide opinion survey, 93 percent of the population said that it supported the sentences and executions.26 And Castro noted: “We have shot no child, we have shot no woman, we have shot no old people.… We are shooting the assassins so that they will not kill our children tomorrow.”27
1,500 revolutionary laws
The Máximo Líder, as he soon came to be known, could count on unconditional popular support for everything he did. “Right from the beginning,” he told Betto, “the people realized that, at last, they had a government of their own.… Our basic ideas about how to do things … were correct.… The revolutionary laws made a tremendous contribution to our people’s political awareness and political education.”28
In the first nine months of 1959, an estimated 1,500 decrees, laws, and edicts were passed.29 On February 7, the Urrutia government adopted a “Basic Law of the Republic,” which partially restored the 1940 Constitution suspended by Batista. A law on housing reform provided for a 50 percent reduction of all rents below 100 pesos, and between 30 and 40 percent on anything higher, while obliging owners of waste building land either to sell up or to clear it for cheap housing. Electricity and telephone charges were also reduced, and the government took (initially provisional) control of the Cuban Telephone Corporation, a subsidiary of ITT. Between January and April, nearly all employment contracts were renegotiated and wages and salaries considerably increased; strong unions ensured that the rise was as much as 15 percent in the case of sugarcane workers. Confiscation measures were introduced on all property that had been acquired under dubious or simply illegal circumstances during the Batista years, especially by politicians
and army officers. Private beaches had to be opened to the whole population, though a law ending racial discrimination was less popular at first, among the largely Creole population of Cuba. High customs duties restricted the importation of more than 200 luxury items, saving more than 70 million in foreign currency within the first year. Successive reforms followed in the areas of health and education, whereby all layers of the population gained an equal right of access to free medical care and appropriate education and training. Plans were laid for a huge literacy campaign, which began in 1961 and soon became a model for other countries in the Third World.
Towards the end of the Batista regime (when there was parity between the Cuban peso and the dollar), Cuba’s annual per capita income stood at 335 – compared with 2,000 in the United States.30 It counted among the most developed countries in the Third World, with one of the highest percentages of dollar millionaires per head of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Long-term unemployment, on the other hand, affected a quarter to a third of the population fit to work – particularly blacks and mulattos, who made up a quarter of the population, living mainly in the east of the island. The rural population, nearly a half of the country’s total, with an average annual income of just 91, was in every respect the most disadvantaged: only 4 percent could regularly afford meat, less than 2 percent eggs, 1 percent fish, 3 percent bread, and almost none fresh vegetables; only 11 percent drank fresh milk even occasionally; more than one in three suffered from deficiency diseases or parasitic infections; three-quarters of the rural housing consisted of palm huts, mostly without running water or electricity. Additionally, 27 percent of children in the towns and 61 percent in the countryside did not attend school, 43 percent of rural dwellers were illiterate, and only 50 percent of the total population could read and write with any degree of proficiency.31
The main, decisive goal was land reform; it was discreetly prepared by the “Bureau for Revolutionary Planning and Coordination,” under Che Guevara’s overall control in Tarará. Agriculture minister Humberto Sorí-Marín, who had drafted the first land reform in October 1958 for the “liberated territories,” had no idea of what was going on. Indeed, he was still drawing up a plan of his own, on Castro’s orders, when the publication of a new law on inheritance caught him by surprise on May 17, 1959. He at once bitterly broke with Castro’s revolution and joined his opponents from the old oligarchy.
It seems that Castro himself would have preferred to omit some of the land reform measures, so that Washington would not come out too soon against the new regime. But Raúl and his Communist allies forced his hand, by encouraging Party supporters (for whom nothing could happen quickly enough) to occupy and expropriate land without the sanction of the law. The first clause of the new law, which came into effect on June 3, 1959, picked up where the old 1940 Constitution had left off, with a limit of 1,000 acres on land ownership. A higher limit of 3,333 acres was allowable for foreign companies, and for sugar or rice growers with yields more than 50 percent above the national average. But everything above that was nationalized, then either converted into a state cooperative, each one 27 hectares (67 acres) in size, or made over to the small private farmers who had been employed there or illegally farmed it on their own account. Although the law directly affected no more than 10 percent of agricultural holdings, these accounted for 40 percent of the land under cultivation.
Five US sugar producers, which together owned or controlled more than 2 million acres of land, were awarded compensation payable over 20 years at a annual rate of interest of 4.5 percent. (US industrial loans with a fixed rate of interest were averaging just 3.8 percent in 1958.) The basis of assessment for compensation, however, was the annual turnover posted with the finance authorities – and since landowners had systematically undervalued this to avoid paying taxes, their deceit over a period of years now turned against them.
This was the beginning of the first major dispute with the old oligarchy and landowners backed by the US government. As things heated up between Havana and Washington and made further negotiation impossible, the old American owners and Cubans now living in the United States found themselves left empty-handed. Other governments, such as that of Canada, refrained from a public quarrel and kept their citizens happy with compensatory payments of their own. (The relatively friendly political and economic relations between Canada and Cuba in later years can be largely traced back to this decision.) It is true that 82 percent of Cuba’s land surface was suitable for agriculture, but at that time only 22 percent was actually in use, and 75 percent of that was controlled by US producers.32 In the medium term, then, it was hoped that the new law would both diversify agriculture away from sugar and extend the area of land under cultivation, bringing improvements in diet and the general economic situation, including a fall in unemployment. At the same time, since fewer profits would be transferred to the United States, more money would remain in Cuba; income distribution would become fairer, and Cuba’s external trade more balanced.
Some business sectors, and especially the Cuban middle class, initially welcomed the Mexican-style land reform as a move away from typical Third World disparities towards greater social equality, and experts in the United States – or at least those remote from big capitalist interests – took a similar position. Towards the end of 1959, a little over 2.5 million acres of land had already been taken over, but the implementation of the reform was slipping out of control as a disastrous combination of revolutionary zeal and low educational levels among the rural population undermined the rational beginnings. Franqui wrote:
But it wasn’t all sweetness and light. Production plummeted, and the rebel army began to seize farms, to imprison landowners, and to kill off breeding bulls just for fun. A class war had begun all through the countryside. On one side, the owners began to sabotage production, and on the other, the rebels disrupted what production there was. Every group hated every other group: it was as if a cyclone were picking everything up to blow it all away.33
Castro never wavered in his attitude, however. “That was the first law,” he later told Betto, “which really established the break between the Revolution and the country’s richest, most privileged sectors and the break with the United States and the transnational corporations.… This law affected the land owned by my own family.”34 After the expropriation of the Castros’ farm, only the living quarters would remain for his mother until her death on August 6, 1963.
In May 1959, a National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) was established to implement the reform, with Castro himself as chairman. According to its director, Antonio Núñez Jiménez, the INRA took over from Castro’s older “kitchen cabinet:” “Fidel turned the INRA into a duplicate of the most important functions of the revolutionary government,”35 thereby further marginalizing the bourgeois-liberal cabinet that formally ran the country. This had anyway not been much in evidence since February 16, 1959, when Miró Cardona had resigned as prime minister because of his lack of power and influence, and Castro himself had taken over the office. Soon the INRA, rather than the government, was responsible for nearly all measures taken by the state in relation to the land: the building of roads, resettlement programs, training projects, health and tourism infrastructure, even the literacy campaign and the creation and funding of the Cuban Film Institute, the ICAIC. It was, in Núñez Jiménez’s combative phrase, “the institution which dealt the death-blow to the bourgeoisie and imperialism.”36
Under pressure from US agribusiness, the State Department in Washington issued a note on June 11, 1959, expressing “concern” about the measures and insisting on the immediate payment of adequate compensation. The Cubans saw this as an “affront to national feelings,” and, in their reply of June 15, took the opportunity to state that – although the 1940 Constitution did provide for immediate cash compensation – Batista’s emptying of the public purse had made it impossible to pay it in that form, and that it should be recovered instead from the assets he ha
d hoarded away in the United States.37
Not only the big landowners and powerful sugar producers howled in protest. The middle layers, who, though initially optimistic, felt increasingly cheated of the fruits of their labor and their life prospects by a new law on real estate, also began to turn away from the revolution. “Instead of taking this into account and pursuing a wise and prudent policy towards those circles, the revolutionary government made a lot of mistakes,” a GDR foreign ministry diplomat noted with irritation in a secret report, citing a conversation with PSP politician Carlos Rafael Rodríguez. “Many small shops and factories were even confiscated simply because their installation was needed for a state enterprise. A real panic then broke out among the middle layers and helped the counter-revolution.”38 The new friends were especially critical of Fidel Castro’s role in the economic transformation: “Too often the prime minister himself has decided things in a ‘partisan manner,’ thereby causing harm to the development of the economy. It should also be said that his methods were adopted by others, leading to a complete mess.” On this view of things, hardly anything would change in subsequent years.