His tactics were remarkably similar to those of General Weyler, the Spanish military tyrant who instituted a “reconcentration campaign” while killing many Cubans during the 1895–1898 Independence War. And they had a similar effect. Castro’s fledgling rebel force, which had shrunk to only a dozen men at one point, swelled with new supporters, as had the insurgency against the Spaniards.
Despite Batista’s repressive measures, the army failed to quell the rebellion. By early 1958, Raúl Castro had opened a second front in northern Oriente, and Juan Almeida commanded a third front north of Santiago. The insurgency also initiated Radio Rebelde from a portable clandestine transmitter in the Sierra Maestra. In bypassing the censured media, the island-wide broadcasts provided encouraging information to supporters, and they were able to organize calls for strikes and demonstrations.
Anti-Batista Forces Composed of Many Factions
But the guerrillas were not the sole threat to Batista’s rule, and perhaps were not even the most important. The rebellion was widespread and took many forms, including individual acts of sabotage, spontaneous violent responses to abuses, small strikes against particular employers, and mass mobilizations. Many were not directed by or coordinated with the July 26th Movement because the urban underground (known as the llano in contrast to the fighters in the mountains, who were known as the sierra) was made up of diverse factions. It included trade unionists, middle-class professionals, students, and even traditional politicians. Raúl Chibás, the brother of Ortodoxo Party founder Eduardo Chibás, led a civic resistance movement. Federation of University Students head José Antonio Echeverria formed a unit to engage in direct action, the Revolutionary Directorate. Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada directed July 26th Movement’s National Student Front from Havana.
In July 1957, Frank País organized a meeting between the Sierra Maestra rebels and key Ortodoxo Party members and other civil leaders. The summit culminated in the “Pact of the Sierra,” which called for measures aimed at deposing Batista in order to hold a democratic presidential election. The convocation’s success set the stage for the unified opposition to Batista that eventually would recognize Fidel Castro as leader of all revolutionary groups.18
More than anyone else, País helped to shape Castro’s crucial international image in those early months. He met regularly with US officials, including CIA operatives, assuring them that Castro’s goals included a pledge of government stability—the perennial concern of US governments dealing with the island, for fear that Cuba under Cuban popular control would become a state similar to Haiti. País assured the Americans that would not be the case. “Indeed the rebels had something of a cheering section back at the analytical section of the CIA, where ‘my staff and I were all fidelistas,’ the lead desk officer for Cuba later noted,” as historian Julia Sweig reports.19
País was both an “inspirational organizer and political fixer,” journalist Richard Gott explains, and had become “the acknowledged leader of the [July 26th] Movement outside the Sierra.”20 He was tireless in uniting the non-sierra factions, and in securing weapons, ammunition, food, and supplies for the fighters. But País’s critical contributions to the struggle ended shortly after the July 1957 Sierra Maestra meeting, when the Santiago police gunned him down in an ambush at the end of the month. His assassination provoked a massive funeral and general strikes that spread across the island.
Only after a major misstep nine months later was the insurgency able to pull itself together in a way that could provide a sufficiently broad base to topple the dictatorship. But that achievement, Sweig learned from Cuban archival documents, would not have been possible without “the work of the 26th of July Movement outside of the Sierra Maestra during the first seventeen months of the insurgency, from November 1956 until April 1958.” Castro, in effect, confirmed her conclusion in a long account he published in 2010 about the last stages of the revolutionary war. The July 26th Movement, he stated, “never considered developing a military force capable of defeating the Cuban Armed Forces.” The strategy was “to create a true revolution,” in which the guerrillas were merely “a well-armed vanguard.”21 In fact, Sweig reports, “until the last six to eight months of the two-year insurrection, the lion’s share of decisions . . . [was] made by lesser known individuals from the urban underground.”22 The turning point came on April 9, 1958, with a failed general strike.
Fidel Castro had opposed calling the strike, arguing that the necessary preparations for success were not in place—a critical mass of workers and the trade unions were not ready to support it, the July 26th Movement had not coordinated with other organizations, and there were not enough weapons for the urban militia to challenge the inevitable violence against workers by the army and police.23 But the llano strongly favored it. In part, the disagreement reflected tension within the broader insurrection over who would lead it. Had a successful strike caused Batista’s government to fall, as a strike in 1933 had overthrown Machado’s dictatorship, leadership of a new government would naturally have fallen to the urban rebels.
Rebels Unite
Impact of Failed General Strike
The strike was an absolute dud. Faustino Pérez summarized the debacle by highlighting a fatal error: the leaders kept the date of the strike secret and then announced it on the radio “at an hour when only housewives listen to the radio.”24 In Havana, few workers participated; no stores, factories, or offices had to close; sabotage caused blackouts that lasted only for a few hours. In Santiago, many workers went on strike, but were quickly replaced by scabs. The air force attacked guerrillas in control of Sagua la Grande in Las Villas Province, driving them away by April 10. The military and police killed more than two hundred rebels, inflicting a major blow to the insurrection.
Despite his opposition, Castro ultimately supported the strike. But in a letter to Celia Sánchez one week later, he described his disappointment and frustration. The strike, he wrote, “involved a great moral rout for the Movement. . . . I am the supposed leader of this Movement, and in the eyes of history I must take responsibility for the stupidity of others, but I am a shit who can decide nothing at all.”25
The tactical failure of the general strike gave Batista hope that the rebellion could still be halted. He redoubled his military effort and sent 10,000 soldiers to the Sierra Maestra in a final attempt to root out Castro’s rebels.26 The two-month campaign failed, and the guerrillas’ success added stature to the sierra fighters and Castro, who seized the opportunity to plan the final phase of the war. In early May, he had emerged from an intense two-day gathering of July 26th Movement factional leaders as the general secretary of the now unified organization and commander-in-chief of the rebel army.27
Pact of Caracas
Two months later, representatives of all of the anti-Batista groups—except the communists—met in Caracas, Venezuela, to hammer out a common program. The breadth of participation in the meeting was unique in Cuban history: trade unionists, students, guerrilla fighters, lawyers from the Civic Resistance and Civic Dialogue, the head of the Catholic Democratic Montecristi Movement, and even Carlos Prío, the discredited president whom Batista had ousted. On July 20, the group endorsed a unity text called the Pact of Caracas, and it named Fidel to be the commander-in-chief of the new united rebel army.28
Meanwhile, the Cuban economy was disintegrating. In 1958, more than half a million people—out of 2.7 million in the labor force—were unemployed or underemployed. The proliferation of street crime and the growing presence of beggars garnered support for the insurrection from the middle class. As some major roads had become impassable and railroad tracks were destroyed by insurgents or damaged in battles, there were shortages throughout the island and some sugar mills had to shut down. Business leaders began to turn on Batista, whom they viewed as the main source of instability and impediment to improved economic conditions.29
Communist, Soviet, and US Roles in the Revolution
The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) was founded in August 1925, largely by eastern European émigrés. Political scientist Mervyn Bain notes that its initial proclamations “were written in Yiddish before being translated into Spanish.”30 It conveyed a sense of being internationalist more than nationalist, and it closely followed whatever party line emanated from Moscow. By the 1940s, however, it also was closely identified with the most militant Cuban trade unions. In keeping with the “popular front” policy of the Third [Communist] International, or Comintern, two PCC members even joined Batista’s cabinet when he served as the constitutionally elected president during World War II. Recall that the PCC had changed its name during World War II to the Popular Socialist Party (PSP). PSP candidates were able to garner 10 percent of the votes cast in the 1946 congressional elections.31
The PSP’s electoral success increased Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s interest in Cuba, especially as the Cold War was beginning. But the Soviets were far too weak to confront the United States directly, and sought to avoid provoking US intervention. In general, they hoped to gain influence through political means, not armed conflict, which coincided with the aims of the PSP leadership. “Cuban communists,” political scientist Marifeli Pérez-Stable explained, “espoused militant reform, not revolution. . . . [They] operated in the political mainstream while challenging the predominant logic of corruption.”32
As a result, the PSP distanced itself from the July 26th Movement’s activities until 1958. The party disparagingly characterized the 1953 Moncada attack as “putschism.”33 PSP sympathizers in the Cuban Labor Confederation discouraged workers from participating in strikes organized by the July 26th Movement, including the April 9, 1958, general strike. It is little wonder that Castro displayed contempt for much of the PSP leadership, and that the July 26th Movement received no assistance from the Soviet Union.
Yet both the Movement and the PSP saw a need to find common ground. If the revolution was going to be inclusive and broad-based—as Fidel, Raúl, and Che intended—it had to involve the communists, who still held considerable influence among trade unionists. From the perspective of the PSP, it feared being left behind as the July 26th Movement gained momentum, and it had nowhere else to turn as Batista increased attacks on the party. In July 1958, after numerous individual meetings between high ranking members of the PSP and the July 26th Movement, a kind of official reconciliation occurred and the PSP joined the unified opposition.34
One indication of how little Cuban affairs concerned the Eisenhower administration was its appointment of Earl E. T. Smith as US ambassador in 1957. A Wall Street financier and mayor of Palm Beach, Florida, Smith’s major credentials for the post were his chairmanship of the Florida Republican Party’s finance committee and his membership on the Republican National Finance Committee.35 However, by early 1958 top US officials grew worried that Batista’s “repressive measures” had “alienated some 80 percent of the Cuban people,” which made instability on the island a threat to US interests.36 And so in March 1958, in an effort to encourage the Cuban dictator to give up power, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suspended new US military assistance to Cuba, which had been receiving the second largest sum in the hemisphere. But he allowed weapons still in the pipeline to flow to Cuba and the US military missions to stay on the island, and he refrained from making a strong public statement against Batista.
While the United States formally maintained a policy of “strict neutrality” in the expanding civil war, some US government agencies sought a “third force” to replace Batista with someone less radical than Fidel Castro.37 Secretary of State Christian A. Herter made this objective explicit in a memorandum to President Eisenhower on December 23, 1958: “The Department has concluded that any solution in Cuba requires that Batista must relinquish power whether as Chief of State or as the force behind a puppet successor. . . . The Department clearly does not want to see Castro succeed to the leadership of the Government.”38 In accord with this policy, earlier in December the State Department had sent a secret emissary to negotiate with Batista, offering him asylum and monetary incentives to leave. Batista refused.
* * *
As the momentum turned toward the rebels in September, Castro came down from the Sierra Maestra and set off on the road to Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second largest city. His top commanders fanned out and fought the disintegrating Batista army on all fronts. Finally, before dawn on New Year’s Day 1959, the dictator packed up his family and friends, headed to the airstrip at Camp Columbia, and departed into ignominious exile in the Dominican Republic. Twenty-five months after Fidel’s exhausted rebel force, armed with only seven guns, began its campaign, the 26th of July Movement had swelled to 50,000 hardened fighters.
Notes
1. Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me,” in Fidel Castro Reader, ed. David Deutschmann and Deborah Schnookal (New York: Ocean Press, 2007), 65–66.
2. Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro: My Life, A Spoken Autobiography (New York: Scribner, 2006), 114–15.
3. Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: Norton, 1993), 54–55.
4. Castro, “History Will Absolve Me,” 103–5.
5. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 61.
6. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 62–63.
7. Pérez, Cuba, 228.
8. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 172.
9. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 173.
10. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 184.
11. Gott, Cuba, 154.
12. Pérez, Cuba, 229.
13. Herbert L. Matthews, “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout,” New York Times, February 24, 1957, 1.
14. Herbert L. Matthews, Fidel Castro (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), 108–9.
15. Matthews, “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout.”
16. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 919, 920.
17. Pérez, Cuba, 229–30.
18. Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 32–36.
19. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 29.
20. Gott, Cuba, 157.
21. Fidel Castro Ruz, La Victoria Estratégica (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2010), 7. [Translation by the authors.]
22. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 9.
23. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 131–32.
24. Quoted in Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 441.
25. Quoted in Szulc, Fidel, 441–42.
26. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 196
27. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 150–51.
28. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, chapter 15.
29. Pérez, Cuba, 237–32; Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 58.
30. Mervyn J. Bain, From Lenin to Castro, 1917–1959 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 33.
31. Bain, From Lenin to Castro, 55.
32. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 49.
33. Bain, From Lenin to Castro, 61.
34. Pérez, Cuba, 242.
35. Marvine Howe, “Earl Smith, 87, Ambassador to Cuba in the 1950s,” New York Times, February 17, 1991.
36. Christian A. Herter, “Memorandum from the Acting Secretary of State to the President,” December 23, 1958, in US Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, Document 189, 305.
37. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, 62–65.
38. Herter, “Memorandum from the Acting Secretary of State to the President,” December 23, 1958, 305.
Part II
Chapter 8
The Quest for Sovereignty
I believe that this is a decisive moment in our history: tyranny has been overthrown. The joy is immense, but there is much left to be done. Let us not fool ourselves into believing that all that lies ahead will be easy; perhaps all that lies ahead may be more difficult. . . . The destiny of Cuba, our own destiny and the destiny of our people are at stake.
—Fidel Castro, January 8, 19591
A Nationalist Revolution
Fidel set off for Havana on January 2, 1959, leading a truck convoy of guerrilla fighters westward. This “caravan of liberty” crossed the country slowly to greet throngs of cheering Cubans and to swell popular support for the July 26th Movement. He arrived triumphantly in Havana on January 8, 1959.
Cubans embraced the 1959 revolution for many reasons, but the common thread was the broad majority’s opposition to the wanton violence and widespread corruption of the Batista regime. The revolution succeeded, Fidel Castro remarked in April 1959, primarily because of the “fear and hatred of Batista’s secret police.”2 The Eisenhower administration had been well aware of the cruelty that Batista’s forces had inflicted on Cubans. A January 1958 State Department memo recommended that the president suspend arms shipments to Cuba, and urged the White House to warn Batista that “excessive brutalities by certain Cuban officials should be curtailed, some of the more violent and sadistic officials of the army and police be removed.”3
Cuba’s new leaders knew that revolutions can quickly turn ugly and destroy the chance for change to take firm root. They wanted to avoid the kind of Jacobin fury that emerged after the 1789 French Revolution. Yet they also sought an outlet for the seething public desire to avenge the Batista regime’s atrocities. By holding public trials in Havana’s central sports stadium, the new government provided a kind of cathartic focus for the pent-up emotions. Arguably, the first six months of the revolution might have been even more violent without such trials. Consider that even as one of the Batista’s regime’s most notorious members—Major Jésus Sosa Blanco—was being tried, vigilantes attempted to lynch two other officers awaiting judgment.4
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