Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Ultimately, the revolutionary government executed about five hundred Batista officials, military officers, and secret police members, and imprisoned hundreds more. Western governments quickly characterized the trials as kangaroo courts. Indeed, they did lack traditional hallmarks of procedural fairness. Yet the public trials and executions were endorsed even by conservative elements of the anti-Batista coalition, such as Prime Minister José Miró Cardona, who willingly signed numerous execution orders, and President Manuel Urrutia Lleó. While the trials thus cost the new government some international confidence, they helped the July 26th Movement to consolidate power and enhance its legitimacy. The “trials” provided the populace with an outlet for its intense anger about the horrors Batista and his henchmen had inflicted on so many innocent Cubans. In retrospect, the toll of officials and officers executed was modest in comparison to what mob justice might have produced. Moreover, thousands of lower-level military members were dismissed without any penalty.

  Leaders of the Movement already had acquired popular support by repeatedly claiming that the revolution was rooted in the ninety years of struggle for independence, which had begun in 1868 with the Ten-Year War. In its Program Manifesto, the July 26th Movement did not focus on the country’s growing wealth gap and entrenched poverty of the population’s bottom third. It defined the revolution’s aims as “national affirmation, human dignity, and democratic order.”5 The leaders charged that earlier revolutionary episodes either had been crushed or stolen by the Spanish or the United States, or had been tainted when inauthentic leaders sold out Cubans’ quest for national sovereignty, as in 1933 after the 100-day government of Ramón Grau San Martín failed. Members of the Communist Party, which was called the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), similarly lacked legitimacy. Several PSP leaders had served in Batista’s first administration in the 1940s, and the party as a whole had opposed armed struggle against Batista in 1956 and 1957.

  The young rebels of the July 26th Movement carried no such baggage. Three of the four revolutionary leaders—Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos—had no ties to communist organizations.6 (Raúl Castro, the fourth, had once attended a World Youth Congress sponsored by the Soviet Communist Party.) Moreover, they had earned the legitimacy to rule from the testament of battle, a willingness to give up their lives for the struggle. Sacrifice—readiness to die for the cause—became the test of authenticity. The revolutionary leaders held up as exemplars historic figures such as José Martí: “Good Cubans were expected to die for their patria.”7 By 1960, the new leaders had transformed the rebel battle cry—libertad o muerte, liberty or death—into a national slogan: patria o muerte, homeland or death.8 In this way authenticity, death, country, and sovereignty became one.

  Fissures Arise

  Competing Interests Emerge

  In his in 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington decried the danger of faction and emphasized the importance of unity for his new, revolutionary country, the United States. He declared, “The Unity of Government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main Pillar in the Edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home; your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty which you so highly prize.”9 Similarly, José Martí repeatedly called for “social unity,” Lillian Guerra explains, which “made him a fiercely seductive symbol whose appropriation became increasingly necessary for competing political sectors in the Republic as they became more divided.” Martí, she notes, “emphasized the power of the collective political will and individual self-sacrifice as the means for resolving differences.”10

  Fidel hearkened to Martí as he anticipated that the new revolutionary government would soon confront the challenge of trying to satisfy competing demands from all those who had united in the single goal of overthrowing the Batista dictatorship. Without a common enemy, he feared, fissures in that unity would emerge quickly. On January 8, he asserted,

  The first thing we who created this revolution must ask ourselves is what were our intentions . . . if we created this Revolution thinking that we would overthrow tyranny and then take advantage of perks of power . . . if we thought it was a matter of getting rid of a couple of ministers to replace them with others. . . . Or if each of us acted selflessly, and each of us acted with a true spirit of sacrifice.11

  Indeed, some moderates had joined the campaign because they were appalled by Batista’s violent repression and disregard for human rights; others had focused on his regime’s corruption and willingness to give the mafia effective carte blanche over part of Cuba’s tourist industry. Some genuinely believed that the enormous gap between the country’s rich and poor could be closed significantly through liberal democratic procedures. These moderates charged that Fidel and the July 26th Movement were “betraying” the goals that led them to join the revolution.

  Class Warfare

  However, some so-called moderates invoked “democracy” merely to protect their property and privilege. Saul Landau astutely observed that they “had little interest in ending the state of dependency with the United States, and absolutely no inclination to channel their wealth to the services of the majority. This was the essence of the class war that confronted Castro and the revolutionaries by the Spring of 1959.”12

  Those who had fought in the mountains and countryside (the sierra fighters) came to believe that the corruption of the old system was so deep that it could not be reformed and should not be restored. Their inclination to take a more radical approach emanated in part from their experiences with the impoverished peasantry. It was reinforced by falling sugar prices, which increased unemployment and exacerbated long-standing problems of inequality between blacks and whites, urban and rural sectors, and western and eastern Cuba. They quickly concluded that foreign domination of Cuba’s economy, which prevented the country from shaping its own fate, was the cause of the dire circumstances.

  Fidel Castro

  After meeting Fidel Castro in April 1959, US vice president Richard Nixon wrote that the Cuban leader “has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men.”* Robert S. McNamara, former US secretary of defense and World Bank president, told Philip Brenner in 2001 that among the group of more than two hundred world leaders he had met, he would rank Castro as the third most impressive (presumably after John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, presidents under whom McNamara had served). Scores of heads of state attended Castro’s funeral in 2016 and lauded his singular contributions to Cuba and the third world. A brief biography cannot capture the essence of what made him a towering historic figure; it provides merely the outline of his life.

  Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born in Biran, Holguín, on August 13, 1926. His father, Ángel Castro, had gone to Cuba from Galicia, Spain, in 1895 as a soldier in the Spanish army and went back to Spain in 1898. Impoverished, he returned to Cuba, borrowed funds to buy land, and operated a 25,000-acre plantation, of which he owned only 2,600 acres. His mother, Lina Ruz González, was a servant at the plantation. She was born in western Cuba to Spanish émigrés.

  Havana’s aristocracy tended to treat Fidel as an unpolished outsider in 1942 when he arrived at the Jesuit-run, prestigious El Colegio de Belén. But his talents and self-confidence enabled him to gain begrudging acceptance among the elites. For some of them, especially those who had known Fidel personally, the ensuing revolution then became a personal as well as a class “betrayal.”

  Fidel’s first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, came from a wealthy and politically influential family. Her brother, Rafael, a classmate of Fidel’s at the University of Havana, introduced her to the future Cuban leader. Rafael’s father, also named Rafael, became minister of communications and transportation during the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. Batista also named Rafael (the son) as deputy minister of the interior, the dreaded secret police. (Rafael emigrated to the United States
in 1959. Two of his four sons were elected to the US House of Representatives where they became virulent opponents of a US-Cuban rapprochement.)

  Fidel first began to focus on politics at the University of Havana, where he studied law. Incensed by the corruption of the Ramón Grau San Martín government, he joined the Ortodoxo (Orthodox) Party shortly after Eduardo Chibás founded it in 1947. That same year, he also joined a group committed to the overthrow of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, and another group that advocated the independence of Puerto Rico. He became head of both, as well as a leader of the Federation of University Students.

  In April 1948, Fidel traveled to an international student congress in Bogotá, Colombia, which was planned as a protest to the founding meeting of the Organization of American States there at the same time. Caught up in a spontaneous riot (known as the Bogotazo) that followed the assassination of popular political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Fidel claims to have barely escaped from Colombia without arrest. He claimed the experience had “a great influence on me. It reaffirmed some ideas and concepts I already had about the exploited masses, the oppressed, the people seeking justice.”†

  Fidel was an Ortodoxo candidate for a seat in the Cuban House of Representatives when Batista canceled the 1952 election after the coup. With his younger brother, Raúl, Fidel then organized a group to overthrow the dictatorship and restore the constitutional republic. The July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba led to his arrest. Released in 1955 under a general amnesty, Fidel left for Mexico to organize from exile an armed insurrection. As commander in chief of the rebel army, he directed the military actions of the 26th of July Movement, and following the 1958 Pact of Caracas, Fidel became head of the unified anti-Batista struggle.

  In 1959, Fidel was initially the commander in chief of the new Cuban armed forces and quickly took on the responsibility of prime minister. He served as first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from its founding in 1965 until 2011. Under the 1976 constitution, he became president of the Council of State and president of the Council of Ministers, positions he temporarily relinquished in 2006 due to illness and formally in 2008. He died on November 25, 2016, in Havana.

  * * *

  * Richard M. Nixon, “Rough Draft of Summary of Conversation between the Vice-President and Fidel Castro,” April 25, 1959, reprinted in Jeffrey J. Safford, “The Nixon-Castro Meeting of 19 April 1959,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 431.

  † Fidel Castro, My Early Years, ed. and trans. Deborah Shnookal and Pedro Álvarez Tabío (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1998), 124.

  US companies were not the only foreign firms involved, but they owned the largest share of Cuba’s basic resources. Ninety percent of Cuba’s telephone and electrical services, 50 percent of public service railways, 40 percent of raw sugar production, and 23 percent of non-sugar industries were US-owned. Three-fourths of the value of Cuba’s imports originated in the United States; 59 percent of Cuban exports—including 80 percent of its exported sugar—went to the United States.13

  Earl E. T. Smith, the US ambassador in 1959, acknowledged in congressional testimony that the United States had been “so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that . . . the American Ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than the President.”14 Sociologist Rafael Hernández sums up what US domination over Cuba meant in 1958: “the United States determined a certain type of Cuban state, an economic and social order, a structure of power, and even a political culture.”15

  Ambivalence about the United States

  In this light, the quest for sovereignty, for an authentic Cuban independence, naturally directed Cuban leaders to transform their country’s relationship with the United States. That goal did not emerge from an anti-American ideology or from the leaders’ visceral hatred of the United States, antipathy to US democracy, or envy of US wealth, as some critics have alleged.16 The conclusion that Cuba could not be both sovereign and dependent on the United States was based on the accumulation of experiences during the previous sixty-year period, as a result of specific US actions in Cuba, and drew from theoretical currents popular in Latin America known as “dependency theory.”17 Cuban anti-Americanism was akin to what historian Max Paul Friedman described in his seminal study of the phenomenon throughout the world. Especially in Latin America, he observed, anti-Americanism was not a concept or ideology but a response to US intervention and exploitation.18 Indeed, it was characterized more by distrust than dislike. Louis Pérez aptly observed that there was a “pervasive ambiguity” for Cubans about North Americans, which alternated “between trust and suspicion, between esteem and scorn, between a desire to emulate and a need to repudiate.”19

  Fidel Castro declared in his first public speech on January 1, 1959, “The history of ’95 will not repeat itself. This time the mambises [revolutionary fighters] will enter Santiago de Cuba!”20 He was referring to the end of the 1895–1898 Independence War, when US forces prevented General Calixto Garcia from entering Santiago with his troops. The meaning was evident: this time the United States would not be able to seize control from the revolutionaries.

  Cuba’s relationship with the United States lay at the heart of the divisions among the anti-Batista factions. For the wealthiest 20 percent of the Cuban population, a break with the United States would produce a fundamental identity crisis because it had acculturated itself intimately to North America’s social norms and values. Pérez describes how the process of acculturation had shaped the elites’ worldview:

  The well-being of many people, specifically as it related to economic development and prosperity, which also implies social peace and political order, was increasingly linked to the United States: entry to its markets, access to its products, use of its capital, application of its technology. . . . These were complex social processes, for they involved the incorporation of a new hierarchy of values into Cuban life. Tens of thousands of Cubans of all classes—children and adults, men and women, black and white—were integrated directly into North American structures at virtually every turn; as customers, clients, coworkers, as employees and business partners, in professional organizations and voluntary associations, at school and in social clubs, in church and on teams.21

  The Cuban elite had sent its children to US universities so that they subsequently could take up management positions with US companies on the island. They had used US products to convey a sense of higher status, and deemed anything American better than anything Cuban—from the arts to the design of buildings, to business strategies. In the late 1950s, Cubans would proudly point to the new Havana Hilton—now the Habana Libre—as an example of great Cuban architecture (see figure 8.1). In fact, it was a based on a standard template that Hilton used throughout the world.

  Figure 8.1. Poster of the new Habana Hilton from 1957.

  As wealthy Cubans did in the early twentieth century when radicals seemed poised to change the social order, some once again called on the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs. Washington was receptive. US officials hoped to maintain the “special relationship” that emanated from both the investments US corporations had made in Cuba and the close ties between Cuban property owners and US capital. These were the very bonds the nationalist revolutionaries aimed to cut so that decisions about Cuba’s economy could be made in Havana, not New York or Washington. The United States had almost never allowed a country in its sphere of influence to act so independently.

  The revolutionary leadership viewed the 1954 US-engineered coup in Guatemala, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, as a demonstration of what to expect from the United States. Castro unsuccessfully attempted to blunt the negative US reaction that he expected, making a goodwill trip to the United States in April 1959. Cuba also offered to repay owners of confiscated lands a price that was greater than their asses
sed values in tax records, and promised to deliver eight million tons of sugar to the United States at a below-market price. But the actions and rhetoric of the revolutionary leaders convinced the US government and most of Cuba’s elites that they could not trust the new government.

  Favoring the “Clases Populares”

  Adapting to a New Culture

  As New Year’s celebrations heralded the coming of 1960, profound changes were evident at all social and economic levels. Many middle-class Cubans already had lost their jobs working for the departing US companies or Cuban bourgeoisie, and those in the former lower ranks saw improvements in their lives. Small farmers gained land, peasants gained education, blacks gained the formal end of racial segregation, urban workers saw reduced rent for housing. “Never before in Cuban history had a government so unabashedly favored the clases populares,”22 political scientist Marifeli Pérez-Stable observes.

  Change involved more than a matter of economic losses or gains. The former elite experienced a profound alienation from the new order. Edmundo Desnoes captured the sensation in his 1967 novel, Inconsolable Memories. The narrator is a former businessman who survives by living off the wealth he had accumulated. Even though he was unwilling to abandon his homeland—as his wife, family, and friends did—the narrator was unable to accept the revolution’s new priorities, which placed a higher value on education and hard work than on consumption and the display of material possessions. “Reality seems to be slipping through my fingers,” he observes. “The revolution has introduced a new vocabulary. Words I don’t use but hear, as if they were Mexican or Venezuelan expressions, or Argentinisms, my own language but in a foreign country. If I keep on being so isolated from everything that’s going on around me, the day will come when I won’t understand a thing.”23