Likewise, the people at the Centro de Prensa Internacional in Havana kept promising contacts in Guantánamo, permission to climb the mirador ridge for a view of the naval base, and contacts to get me to the V Corps landing beach at Daiquiri, which is reserved for military personnel and their families. They kept promising, but all I’d received from the CPI was a tip about a historians’ conference here in Santiago, where I met some of the city’s expert chroniclers, including Herbert Pérez Concepción and Reynaldo Cruz Ruiz, who offered interviews and access to archives. In the meantime, I visited history at home.
Maricel’s aunt, Lilia Lucero de Ramirez, lives just across a tree-lined side street from the Moncada Barracks, one of the shrines of the Cuban Revolution. The walled compound looks like the castle in a cartoon fairy tale, a broad, yolk-yellow cube topped with battlements more decorative than militarily useful. On July 26, 1953, a young lawyer, Fidel Castro, led about 140 insurgents in an attack on the barracks. The plan was to make a spectacular start on a revolt against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship by striking at a symbol of oppressive power—and seizing enough weaponry to arm hundreds of santiagueros. But the plan was undone by bad luck, mistakes, and superior firepower. The poorly armed rebels were defeated; many were killed outright, and sixty-eight more were tortured to death. Castro and a few survivors were jailed, and only a fool would have predicted that they’d live long.
Five and a half years later, Castro ruled Cuba. Batista’s mistakes—starting with amnesty for the Moncada survivors—had allowed the amateur revolutionist to survive and start a real war. When his troops entered Havana on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro was in Santiago, the city of his initial defeat. He proclaimed the triumph of the Revolution from the balcony of the old Spanish governor’s mansion on Santiago’s Parque Cespedes, fifteen minutes’ walk from Aunt Lilia’s home. It was by his decree that the Moncada Barracks became a museum and a school, symbolizing the Revolution’s promise of empowerment for the people of Cuba. On weekdays, uniformed children mug for tourists’ cameras in the Moncada’s tall, barred windows.
Maricel made me welcome in Aunt Lilia’s kitchen.
“Sit down,” she said, laughing. “Get comfortable. She’s going to feed you whether you’re hungry or not.”
The kitchen air was literally rich with scents, with unaccustomed abundance: a huge pot of stewing chicken, pots of beans and rice, and batches of the addictive fried plantain slices called tostones. Lilia was busy at a tiny, 1950s-style gas stove, the heart of a stuccoed, six-room house that houses her, son Oscar and his wife, Merari, and the couple’s preteen daughters Lilia—called Lisette—and Elizabeth. The rooms are small by North American standards, but two of them are living rooms—one equipped with a piano—ready to receive guests.
At seventy-nine, Lilia was still the kind of neighbor whose door is always open, whose home is the spot on the block where passersby stop and end up staying for a cup of her thick, sweet coffee. An extra chair could always be found, and her invocation of the Cuban welcome—”My house is your house”—conveyed unstinting conviction.
The habits of improvisation, sharing, and hospitality are essential to life in Cuba. The island nation’s economy has struggled for half a century against an embargo on trade imposed by the United States, once far and away its major trading partner. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s holdout Communist economic structure has had to make do without its former ally’s massive support. So most Cubans do a lot of searching and scrounging, standing in line for and often doing without even the most basic things, from vegetables and rice to aspirin and T-shirts.
The government rations commodities so that everyone gets a theoretically equal share of what little there is, from foodstuffs to health care to housing. Almost everyone can get an appointment with a doctor, but there may not be medicine to match the diagnosis—even meds as simple as ibuprofen or aspirin.
Virtually everyone has a roof overhead, but most homes are badly in need of renovation, and some roofs are only sheets of corrugated tin balancing on walls of naked cinder blocks. The great majority of Santiago’s houses and apartment blocks are scabby with peeling paint and crumbling stucco, but in the back blocks of Reparto Vista Alegre there’s a neighborhood of grand, freshly painted houses, the homes of Communist Party chiefs and favorites.
Lilia’s ability to spread such an elaborate table this lunchtime, to keep plunging ever more plaintains into precious oil, is due to the dollars Maricel contributes to the household.
Lilia’s house is typically Caribbean in its exuberant colors: the first living room is a minty green. Her decorations—mostly framed reproductions and old prints, including one of two loving birds—are expressive of a pacific spirit. She is an important organizer for the Baptist church in Cuba. The fast-growing denomination is making the most of the limited but undeniably broader freedoms in the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” The government depends on tourist dollars and cubanos’ black-market ingenuity to help make ends meet, and that tacit admission of failure has inevitably created a little space for religious, social, and even political unorthodoxy.
In this small kitchen, a person seated at the antique Formica-topped table could shake the tostones in their frying pan. Though she’s an activist for religious freedom in a totalitarian state, Lilia is not a rebel in all things, and she would never sit to eat while guests—especially men—are still being served. When I finally convinced her that I’d eaten my fill of tostones, when there was sweet coffee for all and nothing more to do for anyone else, Lilia finally sat down for an interview.
Maricel and her cousin Tato, a gracious young civil servant with fine English skills, were there to help translate. Lilia and I had talked before, about Maricel’s mother and famous father, but this time I asked her to outline the history of the whole Lucero family.
“Well, I had a beautiful, large family,” she began, her smile bright and only a little sad. Lilia is the prototype for Maricel’s dramatic beauty, slender and large-eyed, bird-quick in gesture. Lilia’s mother, Amparo Moya, was the daughter of Spanish immigrants from the Canary Islands. Her father, Manual Lucero, was a native santiaguero. “They got married when she was fifteen and he was twenty-seven, and they had eleven children, six males and five females. I was one of the last four.
“My father was a man of strong character, very capable, very determined. In one of the small rebellions early in the century, he went to the mountains to fight. His side lost, and as a consequence he lost his job.” The young couple moved frequently in search of work. Seven children were born in different towns in Oriente before Manuel found employment as a soldier guarding Central Miranda, a new sugar mill and company town built in 1917 by Warner Sugar.
Warner was one of many U.S. companies securing the spoils of the 1898 invasion. The war had ostensibly been fought for i Cuba Libre!; Congress’s declaration of war against Spain had even included an amendment, written by Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, disclaiming all “intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control” over Cuba, and promising to “leave the government and control of the island to its people.” Once in control, however, the United States refused to withdraw its occupation troops until the new Cuban republic adopted a constitution incorporating a list of demands composed by Elihu Root, secretary of war in the cabinet of Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the presidency after William McKinley’s assassination. Congress approved Root’s ultimatum in the form of an amendment sponsored by Connecticut Senator Orville Platt.
The Platt Amendment to Cuba’s charter—reluctantly approved by the Cuban Constitutional Convention in 1903—gave Washington control of Cuba’s foreign relations and its ability to contract debt. The latter provision essentially ceded control of the new nation’s budget and monetary policy. The United States would have the power to enforce that control by invading Cuba at any time “for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and
individual liberty.” To enable such generous protection, Cuba would “sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations”—meaning, at the very least, the Guantánamo Bay base seized by the Marines at the beginning of the Santiago campaign.2
No stability-and-security justification was offered for the larcenous demand that the verdant Isle of Pines, as obviously a part of Cuba as the Keys are part of Florida, “shall be omitted from the proposed constitutional boundaries of Cuba, the title thereto being left to future adjustment by treaty.” Finally, the Platt Amendment wiped the slate clean by declaring “all Acts of the United States in Cuba during its military occupancy … ratified and validated,” and double-bound the future by commanding Cuba to sign a treaty underscoring all its demands.
The amendment made Cuba a colony in everything but name. The El Cobre-born mambi leader José Lacret served as a Constitutional Convention delegate; when the amendment was accepted, he cried, “Cuba is dead; we are enslaved forever!” The U.S. military governor, General Leonard Wood, was more matter-of-fact when writing to his friend and former Rough Rider second in command, Theodore Roosevelt: “There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba.”
With the Platt Amendment, the United States was pioneering a new kind of colonialism, one that allowed Americans to pretend that their revolutionary republic hadn’t become an overseas empire. The pretense of Cuban independence absolved the United States of any responsibility it didn’t care to assume. This innovative system, which scholars today often call “neocolonialism,” gave American capital almost unrestricted power in overseas possessions. At home, American citizens wanted government to defend them against monopolies and trusts, union-busting and financial fraud. But in America’s neocolonial possessions, capital could do as it pleased. The nominal Cuban government had no real power, and Washington used its Platt Amendment suzerainty to help American investors exploit the island.
The key to making Cuba pay was the creation of a new island economy, more dependent than ever before on a single product: sugar.
The United States slashed tariffs on American goods entering Cuba but kept the tariff on most Cuban exports high. The great exception was cane sugar. In 1903, as a reward for Cuba’s acceptance of the Platt Amendment, the United States offered a Treaty of Reciprocity, which guaranteed that it would purchase at least 20 percent of its sugar from Cuba and that Cuban sugar growers would pay no tariff on that export.
“Reciprocity” was a Trojan horse, opening Cuba to helpless exploitation. The treaty forced Cuba to lower protective tariffs against hundreds of American products, which quickly overwhelmed homegrown competitors. And the sugar-purchasing guarantee was, in actuality, a contract between the U.S. government and the cartel of U.S. corporations taking over and transforming the Cuban sugar industry.
Stateside money was transforming the island. Within a few years of the conquest, American investors owned controlling interests in utility companies and other key modernizing infrastructure, more than 80 percent of all mines, more than 10 percent of the land, and as much as 60 percent of prime agricultural tracts.
Change was most dramatic in the backward, war-scarred East. Burgeoning global markets and efficient new technologies made it profitable to grow cane sugar in previously undeveloped swathes of Oriente and Camaguey, and sweetheart deals allowed American corporations to buy hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land at one dollar per acre.
When the United States reinvaded Cuba in 1906 to protect American-owned property from rebellion against the new social order, military governor Charles Edward Magoon did everything in his power to make investment even more profitable for U.S. corporations, including the commitment of 650,000 dollars of Cuba’s own money on railroads and roads to help the new plantations—built around modern mills called centrales—get their product to market. With such assistance, over the three decades following the War of 1898, the East’s share of Cuban sugar production went from less than a tenth to more than 60 percent.
Warner Sugar built its Miranda central about twenty-five miles north of Santiago, over the wall of mountains, on the edge of Cuba’s great southern agricultural plain. Its great, engine-driven mill was perfectly situated to process a tremendous portion of the zafra, the annual sugarcane harvest. The new town’s housing was apportioned according to a strict caste system, from the few grand homes of norteamericano executives on down to the hovels allotted the great mass of cane-cutters and mill workers. The hierarchy of power and dependency reflected the distorting power of U.S. corporate, banking, and government policy, which created a new, spectacularly productive sugar economy that actually made Cubans poorer than before.
Sugar had been important under Spanish rule, but in the economy of pre-1898, overtly colonial Cuba had been relatively diverse and self-sustaining. The United States’ neocolonial policies made sugar the sole determinant of Cuban prosperity. Before 1898, the island was producing less than five hundred thousand tons of cane sugar per year; by 1919, annual output was approaching five million tons. More tellingly, by the 1920s, sugar represented four fifths of all Cuban exports. Sugar production figures and prices sent the island’s economy flying and falling like a kite in a fitful breeze.
The shift to a monocrop economy quickly made Cuba far less self-sufficient. Undercapitalized and indebted, the old landed class of Cuban sugar planters could not compete with foreign money; most were forced to sell out. Poor but independent subsistence farmers were driven off their modest farms by sharp practice, debt, and decree. Hundreds of thousands of cane cutters were brought in from Haiti, Jamaica, and other islands to serve the new, super-scale industry. While Stateside investors profited by converting millions of Cuban acres to sugar production, Cuba ceased to be able to feed itself.
With so much land lost to sugarcane, the island became dependent on imported meat and rice, vegetables and eggs—most, inevitably, purchased from the United States. Yet only a minority of Cubans could afford to buy these imported foods. The growing class of landless cane cutters, the macheteros, worked only during the dry months from November through April, the months leading to the zafra, the great sugar harvest. In the months between, the tiempo muerto (“dead time”), millions of landless workers lived on what little they’d saved of zafra wages, then on gleanings and forage until the fields and fruit trees were picked clean. Then they starved.
In the tiempo muerto, macheteros often had nothing more to feed their children than guarapo, a treacly juice made from squeezing cane stubble. Che Guevara said that this fact alone was all the justification any revolution needed.
The last four Lucero siblings were born in Central Miranda, where Manuel’s job kept the family a step above the abject poverty of their seasonally employed neighbors. Lilia says her father was “one of the soldiers in charge of securing the central,” most likely a member of the Rural Guard.
The Guard was created by military governor Leonard Wood, who understood that the forced demobilization of Cuba’s mambises created a class of disaffected veterans dangerous to the occupation regime. Better, Wood thought, to “unify the sentiment of our people and the Cubans” by forming a neocolonial army. “Every native soldier, well paid, well uniformed, and well taken care of, forms a friendly bond between ourselves and all his relatives … they would be of immense value in building up American sentiment, and respect for American institutions and American officials.”
“The principal responsibility of the rural guard,” Louis A. Perez Jr. explains in Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902, “consisted of protecting property interests in the interior … By 1905, the vast majority of the rural guard’s outposts were located on privately owned property; of 288 stations, only 28 were owned outright by the state; the remainder were either privately rented or donated rent-free by municipalities and business enterprises,” most notably giant American ventures such as Warner Sugar, Juraguá Iron, and United Fruit.
Manuel was lucky to have a steady job through the 1920s, a t
ime when collapsing sugar prices, corrupt government, and rapacious U.S. trade policies were pushing millions of Cubans deeper into poverty.
“My father was a person whose word was gold,” Lilia remembered. “His integrity was everything to him … But at some point, he started to drink with friends. When he understood that he had no control over alcohol, he killed himself.”
Manuel died in December 1931. Lilia was five. The youngest child, Oscar, was just one year old.
“It was a very difficult thing, because he [Manuel] was the foundation of the family. But my mother was strong, too.” Lilia’s mother never married again. She kept the family together, though she couldn’t work outside the home “because, in those days, it was not acceptable for respectable women to do so. We survived on our older brothers’ work and a small farm and house that my father left us.
“Time went by and we finished school. My love for teaching became evident early on. I used to help the teacher with all her students, everyone together from second to sixth grade with just one teacher. And this was the only public school” in the sugar company’s town.
The Luceros were surviving, but the younger children would never escape poverty with sixth-grade educations. “About that time,” Lilia said, “my mother converted to the Baptist faith and started to work as a church volunteer. There were meetings held with pastors at the house. There was one pastor in particular, Agustin Gonzalez, who we will never forget. He said, ‘If your sons can support you here in this town, then they can support you in Palma, where we have a high school.’
“We moved to Palma Soriano, which is about two hours from Santiago, and went to school there … With Pastor Gonzalez’s help, we studied at no cost. He showed great concern for us and our academic and spiritual development. When we finished studying in Palma there were no superior studies, so we went to Santiago.”
Yankee Come Home Page 16
