Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Ending Racial Disparities

  Even for those whose lives improved, the disruptions were bewildering as norms and roles changed. The government promoted a new public consciousness that challenged routine daily practices and even the way people talked to each other. In a March 1959 speech, newly appointed prime minister Fidel Castro called for an end to all legal forms of discrimination—in schooling, employment, and public facilities—and said that racism was tantamount to acting as a traitor against the Cuban state. “It should not be necessary to pass a law to establish a right that is earned for the simple reason of being a human being and a member of society,” he asserted, adding,

  What should be proclaimed is anathema and public condemnation against those men, full of leftover prejudices, who have so few scruples that they discriminate against a Cuban, mistreat a Cuban, over a matter of lighter or darker skin. . . . We are going to put an end to racial discrimination at work centers by waging a campaign . . . to end this hateful, repugnant system with a new slogan: work opportunities for every Cuban, without racial or sexual discrimination. In this way we will forge, step by step, the new homeland.24

  Blacks and mulattos made up a much higher proportion of the population in Cuba than in the United States. The 1953 census recorded 26.9 percent of Cuba as black or mulatto; in the 1981 census it was 33.9 percent.25 While racial discrimination before 1959 may have been less a result of interpersonal prejudice than in the United States, it was entrenched in the way Cuban institutions functioned. Lourdes Casal, a seminal scholar on the subject of racism in Cuba, pointed out that several factors softened the expression of racism. “[T]he most important leaders of the Cuban independence struggle such as José Martí (white) and Antonio Maceo (black),” she wrote, placed great emphasis on “racial unity and integration.”26

  Still, darker-skinned Cubans attended schools—when they were available—vastly inferior to those for whites. Afro-Cubans had the worst living conditions and held the lowest-paid jobs. There was some social mobility for nonwhite Cubans: Cubans elected Fulgencio Batista, a light-skinned mulatto, as president in 1940. But the white, upper-class Havana Yacht Club denied membership to Batista while he was in office from 1940 to 1944.

  Ending Gender Disparities

  Gender inequality was perhaps even more entrenched than racism. It also was quickly challenged. Notably, the 1955 “Manifesto Number One” of the July 26th Movement called for the end to “all vestiges of discrimination for reasons of race or sex.”27 Data from the 1953 census reveal some indication of women’s inequality in Cuba at the time: only 19 percent of the workforce were women. While the overall literacy rate for men and women was comparable, only two-thirds of ten-year-old girls were attending school; fully two times the number of men versus women over the age of twenty-five had received any university education. The problem was not merely the result of overt discrimination and the lack of opportunity. Cuba, like most of Latin America, had a macho culture whose norms reinforced notions of “men’s” and “women’s” work. Daily rituals structured different men’s and women’s roles in the family and in their social relations outside of the home.

  While Fidel asserted in 1966 that the “phenomenon of women in the revolution was a revolution within a revolution,”28 the prominent women revolutionary fighters—such as Celia Sánchez, Haydee Santamaría, and Melba Hernández—focused their energies on ousting Batista, not on fighting for women’s equality. Vilma Espín Guillois, Raúl Castro’s wife, became the champion for women in the new society (figure 8.2 shows how her contributions garnered her representation on a postage stamp).

  Figure 8.2. A 2008 postage stamp honoring Vilma Espín Guillois.

  Espín was the first woman in Cuba to obtain a chemical engineering degree. She fought alongside Raúl in 1957 and 1958, and they married in 1959, three weeks after the triumph of the revolutionary forces. In 1960, she took charge of the newly created Federation of Cuban Women. Her goal was to gain legal equality for women, to make those rights meaningful by providing support that women needed in order to engage fully in society—day care, skills training, education, and cultural awareness—and to advocate for women’s advancement in all sectors of society.29

  Cuban film director Humberto Solás conveyed the impact of the changed status for women in his epic 1968 film, Lucía, which consists of three stories about women named Lucía in three different revolutionary periods, 1898, 1933, and the early 1960s. In the first story, Lucía is an idle upper-class Cuban woman who unintentionally betrays her brother, a soldier fighting for independence, as the result of a naïve romance with a Spanish spy. In the 1933 episode, Lucía is a revolutionary, but serves merely as an adjunct to the men. The third Lucía lives in the countryside with her husband, who expects his wife to cater to him in traditional ways. But she wants to be educated and is painfully torn between her love for him and her anger at his attempts to limit and deny her the opportunities for education that the Cuban revolution was offering.

  Quest for Sovereignty

  Hovering over all the changes was the quest for sovereignty. The leaders of the 1959 revolution believed that if they failed to secure this goal, their victory would be nearly as hollow as previous revolutionaries. True independence would mean that Cuba, not foreign companies, had control over the country’s basic resources and infrastructure. It also meant that Cuba would need to expand its trading relations, so it would not depend on only one country, and to diversify how it earned hard currency beyond selling sugar. Relying mainly on sugar exports left the country vulnerable to the variability of the international commodity market, while the cost of finished products that the country needed to import kept rising.

  Hard Currency

  The term “hard currency” refers to money generally accepted for international trade. Economists call such funds convertible currencies. Today only the US dollar, European euro, Japanese yen, and British pound merit the designation.

  People who live in countries that create one of the four freely convertible currencies, such as the United States, may find it difficult to appreciate the anxiety most countries of the world suffer because they do not have ready access to hard currency. But consider a simple example that suggests why sellers require buyers to use hard currency for international transactions. Suppose you had traveled to a town in the United States hundreds of miles from home. Short on cash, and without a credit card, you find that all ATM machines are broken when you need to pay your motel bill. Fortunately, you brought a check from Pit Stop Bank in your city. But would the motel owner be likely to accept your check? Would you accept such a check in payment for selling goods or your services? The currencies of most countries are like a check from Pit Stop Bank, which is why those countries need to use a universally acceptable currency.

  There are essentially three legal ways in which Cuba obtains hard currency. It can: (1) sell goods or services for hard currency, including sugar, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, beach vacations, and the labor of Cubans; (2) receive “gifts,” including foreign assistance grants from governments and remittances from individuals; (3) take out loans from an international financial institution, a bank, a global corporation, or a foreign government, which typically must be repaid in hard currency. “Gifts” have become increasingly less available to poor countries, and loans—in the worst cases—may incur interest payments that could absorb as much as 50 percent of a country’s hard currency earnings from the first two sources.

  Most countries cannot be self-sufficient and must rely on imports in order to survive. Cuba imports food, oil for heating, electricity, transportation, manufactured goods, and even ordinary items of daily life such as needle and thread. With only a limited reserve of hard currencies earned from selling goods and services, Cuba must evaluate every import in relation to the total amount of hard currency it has available to spend. This situation presses Cuba to search continually for a strategy that will enable it
to earn more hard currency in order to develop its economy.

  Cuba’s reliance on sugar as its main source of hard currency had several harmful consequences. Cane was grown on land that could have produced food for domestic consumption, and as a result, Cuba had to spend scarce hard currency on importing food. Cuba’s infrastructure was oriented to sugar production, which made starting other industries expensive. Work in the sugar industry was mostly seasonal, and laborers commonly had no employment or income for eight months of the year. The resulting inequality forced Cuba to depend on foreigners for a range of services that poorly educated Cubans could not provide.

  In short, by 1960 Cuba’s revolutionary leaders assumed that in order to develop a citizenry that had the dignity to believe in its own self-worth, they had to establish the country’s sovereignty, which would require a transformed relationship with the United States. In effect, Cuba’s leaders chose sovereignty over dependency and the quest for sovereignty became the Cuban Revolution’s guiding objective.

  Notes

  1. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” January 8, 1959, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f080159e.html.

  2. Thomas Bergenschild, “Dr. Castro’s Princeton Visit, April 1959,” as quoted in Gott, Cuba, 166.

  3. William A. Wieland, “Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Middle American Affairs (Wieland) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Rubottom),” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Office of the Historian), Document 5, January 17, 1958, 10.

  4. R. Hart Phillips, “Batista Major Condemned in Havana Stadium Trial,” New York Times, January 24, 1959, 1.

  5. “Program Manifesto of the 26th of July Movement,” November 1956; reprinted in Cuba in Revolution, ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1972), 113.

  6. Antoni Kapcia, Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the 1950s (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 28.

  7. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 332.

  8. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 338.

  9. George Washington, “The Farewell Address,” Transcript of the Final Manuscript, September 19, 1796; available at the Papers of George Washington, University of Virginia, 5 and 6, http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/farewell/transcript.html.

  10. Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6.

  11. Castro, “Discurso,” January 8, 1959.

  12. Saul Landau, “Asking the Right Questions about Cuba,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988), xxiii.

  13. Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 18–19, 35; Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 35; Robin Blackburn, “Prologue to the Cuban Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 21 (October 1963): 59–60.

  14. Testimony of Earl E. T. Smith in “Communist Threat to the United States Through the Caribbean,” Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 86th Cong., 2nd Sess., Part 9, August 30, 1960.

  15. Rafael Hernández, “Intimate Enemies: Paradoxes in the Conflict Between the United States and Cuba,” in Debating US-Cuban Relations: Shall We Play Ball? ed. Jorge I. Domínguez, Rafael Hernández, and Lorena G. Barberia (New York: Routledge, 2011), 20.

  16. Brian Latell, After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro’s Regime and Cuba’s Next Leader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Jaime Suchliki, “Why Cuba Will Still Be Anti-American After Castro,” Atlantic, March 4, 2013.

  17. H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-Soviet World (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 36–42; Heraldo Muñoz, ed., From Dependency to Development (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981); Fernando Enrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

  18. Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter 4.

  19. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, xvi.

  20. Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha con Fidel—1959 (Havana: Editoria Letras Cubanas, 1998), 24. Translation by the authors. Original: “¡La historia del 95 no se repetirá! ¡Esta vez los mambises entrarán en Santiago de Cuba!”

  21. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 7, 157.

  22. Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution, 67.

  23. Edmundo Desnoes, Inconsolable Memories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 140.

  24. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech,” March 23, 1959. University of Texas, “Castro Speech Data Base, http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1959/19590323.html.

  25. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899–1981,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 1 (January 1995): 135.

  26. Lourdes Casal, “Race Relations in Contemporary Cuba,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988), 477.

  27. Quoted in Sarah Stephens, Women’s Work: Gender Equality in Cuba and the Role of Women in Building Cuba’s Future (Washington, DC: Center for Democracy in the Americas, 2013), 21.

  28. Fidel Castro, “Speech at Close of Fifth FMC National Plenum,” December 10, 1966, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1966/19661210.html.

  29. Max Azicri, “Women’s Development through Revolutionary Mobilization,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988), 457–66; Raisa Pagés, “The Status of Women: From Economically Dependent to Independent,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

  Chapter 9

  Consolidating the Revolution

  Culture and Politics

  The character of “Cuban” had become contested terrain, and the contest itself served as a force of change. Never before had the narrative on nationality so fully engaged the public imagination. Much of this had to do with the affirmation Cuban, of a Cuba for Cubans. . . . The proposition of Cuban resonated across the island. Once more consumption became a way to affirm nationality, but now the products were Cuban-made. Advertisers stressed the virtues of locally produced merchandise. Vitamin supplement Transfusán B-12 was identified as “Cuban and better!” . . . The demand for Cuban spread in all directions. Architects called for a national building style. “Operación discos Cubanos” announced a campaign to organize a national record company. The National Ballet was established in June 1959. A national film company, the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), was organized in March 1959. Cuban musicians and entertainers began to work the nightclub and cabaret venues. For the first time since its opening in 1957, the Copa Room at the Hotel Riviera staged an all-Cuban production.

  —Louis A. Pérez, Jr.1

  The Revolution exhilarated a broad majority of Cubans, giving them hope that they could right the wrongs of neocolonial exploitation and remedy long-term injustices. (In 1960, a respected public opinion poll found that 86 percent of respondents supported the government and half of those were “fervent” backers.2) Yet that spirit alone would hardly suffice to achieve revolutionary goals. The victors faced daunting tasks in four arenas if they were to make the 1959 revolution different than the failed efforts in 1898 and 1933: (1) Culture, strengthening Cubans’ identity with the country by privileging and even creating a distinctive Cuban culture; (2) Politics, changing the relationship between the citizen and the state; (3) New institutional order, including new ministries, legal structures, and processes s
o that the Revolution did not depend only on Fidel’s charisma; (4) Economics, reconstituting the economy in a way that engendered growth with equity and enabled the government to satisfy everyone’s basic human needs. We will explore how they pursued the goals of the first two realms in this chapter, and examine the other two in the next chapter.

  Culture

  Especially in the early years, the possibility that Cubans actually could achieve the revolution of their dreams had to be sustained largely by faith, not results. Revolutionary change would entail sacrifices: the middle and upper classes would lose wealth, privileges, and status; workers and peasants would be deprived of normalcy, some of their values would be challenged, and demands for nonpaid “social labor” would disrupt routines of daily life. Clashes with the United States would involve the loss of life and could cause the economy to suffer. This made Fidel Castro’s charismatic leadership essential to the success of the Revolution, infusing it with a messianic energy.

  Ever since the 1960s, when American pundits began to misapply the concept of “charisma” to characterize the handsome President John F. Kennedy, the term has been casually used to describe anyone who seems to make a crowd swoon. But true charisma is a rare power that the populace itself grants to a leader, and it is achieved only when followers believe the leader shares their values and goals. “Charisma implies a social relation between leader and followers,” sociologist Nelson Valdés explains.3 In turn, the public accepts and reveres the charismatic leader with a blindness akin to faith. Historian Oscar Zanetti further explains: “In the context of a fluid social situation, with the old political system in crisis and its institutions falling apart, the personality of Fidel Castro was decisive for the consolidation and development of the revolutionary process.”4