Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Tension came to a head in August 1960, as a majority of bishops approved a pastoral letter declaring that communism and Catholicism were incompatible. The letter reflected increasingly outspoken charges that the government had become infiltrated with communists.26 At about the same time, Father John Walsh, a US priest, began working with Cuban churches on a CIA-sponsored program that used children as pawns to sow fear and dissent within Cuba in order to undermine the government’s legitimacy.

  Called “Operation Peter Pan,” the project began with a scare campaign. According to Antonio Veciana, a leader in the underground terrorist organization Alpha 66, he and CIA operative David Atlee Phillips spread false rumors that the Cuban government planned to abolish parental rights, remove children from their homes—especially those in religious families—and dispatch them to the Soviet Union where they would be indoctrinated with Marxist-Leninist dogma.27 Local parishes then offered the frightened families a chance to send their children to the United States where they supposedly would be cared for by well-intentioned US Catholic groups enlisted by the CIA and State Department. More than fourteen thousand children between the ages of six and sixteen traveled unaccompanied by their parents, most without relatives waiting for them in the United States. Some never saw their parents again.28

  Politics

  New Government

  On January 2, 1959, the day after Batista fled and his government collapsed, the July 26th Movement installed Manuel Urrutia Lleó as provisional president and José Miró Cardona as prime minister. They headed a coalition cabinet that assumed both executive and legislative powers. Urrutia had been a moderate judge whose sympathies lay with the July 26th Movement, but who had not been politically active. His father had been a major in the Independence War against Spain, but he imagined his role essentially as symbolic. He enjoyed rising late, had no taste for political battle, and was fixated on the singular goal of ridding the island of vices such as gambling. Miró Cardona was president of the national bar association (formally, the Cuban College of Lawyers) and had been one of Fidel Castro’s law school professors. A civil libertarian, he had refused to accept many of the demands Batista sought to impose on the judiciary, and had attempted to fashion a “Civic Dialogue.”29

  Below them, a range of Batista’s opponents took seats in the new cabinet, which moderate reformers dominated. It included only a few members of the July 26th Movement, such as Armando Hart and Enrique Oltuski, or close collaborators, such as Faustino Pérez. Fidel claimed he did not want a government post, but Urrutia named him commander-in-chief of the armed forces.30

  The coalition did not hold together for long. Barely one month after its formation, Miró Cardona relinquished his position. Arguing that Fidel effectively was running the government, the departing prime minister said that the rebel leader might as well hold the official title. Castro accepted the position, on the condition that he would chair cabinet meetings and that Urrutia could not attend them.31 In May 1959, the cabinet replaced Urrutia with Osvaldo Dortícos Torrado. An upper-class lawyer, Dortícos already had served the new government as minister of justice.

  In October, a cabinet shuffle brought in Raúl Castro as minister of defense, moving Fidel loyalist Augusto Martínez Sánchez to the Ministry of Labor. The next month Faustino Pérez and Manuel Ray resigned their ministerial posts. Pérez had been in charge of cataloging and distributing properties owned by Batista and his cohorts; Ray was in charge of public works. Seventeen months later, Ray was one of the commanders in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  By the beginning of 1960, nearly all of the moderates were gone from the cabinet. With defections seeming to occur daily, the situation provided an opportunity for former PSP adversaries of the July 26th Movement to ingratiate themselves with the new leaders. They had been left out of the coalition initially but had no interest in joining defectors who were headed to exile in the United States. Their steady accumulation of influence in 1960 in turn led to outright opposition by some anti-communist moderates.

  Military

  Perhaps the most dramatic early rejection came from Húber Matos, a former rice grower who had risen to the rank of comandante (major) in the rebel army and was serving as the military governor of Camagüey Province. Matos felt especially aggrieved by the new government’s agrarian reforms, which he viewed as evidence that communists had seized control of the Revolution. On October 19, 1959, he resigned his post and several of his lieutenants left with him.

  To Fidel and Raúl, the resignations were an ominous threat to the country’s stability in its heartland, in part because of Camagüey’s economic importance as a source of cattle for the country.32 The day after Matos resigned, Fidel sent Camilo Cienfuegos, the army chief of staff, to arrest the dissident major in his home. Speaking to a rally of half a million people, the prime minister asserted that Matos was a “traitor” who intended “to use soldiers against the Revolution, against the rights of the Cuban people.”33 A court convicted Matos of treason and he served twenty years in prison.

  Matos’s departure highlighted a challenge the revolutionary government faced in constituting a new national army. It certainly was not going to use senior officers in the hated Batista military, which numbered 18,500 troops when his government fell.34 But the victorious rebel army was less than half that size at the time of the Revolution. Nevertheless, it became the cornerstone of Cuba’s new military, the Fuerzas Armadas de la Revolucion (FAR) or the Revolutionary Armed Forces. In addition, in the wake of Matos’s arrest, Fidel announced on October 26 the creation of the National Revolutionary Militia, a people’s army.

  Raúl Castro took the central role of transforming the rebel forces into a professional institution within three years, expanding it to about 300,000 members at its largest.35 While some have attributed the makeover to the organizational help of the Soviet Union, it actually happened before the Soviet Union came on the scene in a major way. By 1962, the militia numbered nearly 150,000 members.

  The most difficult campaign that the new army faced was the seven-year war against counterrevolutionaries, most of whom operated out of the Escambray Mountains in west central Cuba.36 From 1959 to 1966, various groups of “bandidos”—as Fidel dismissively labeled them37—engaged in a variety of attacks that today most Americans would describe as terrorism. They not only killed Cuban soldiers and militia, but also volunteer teachers; they detonated bombs in factories and stores, burned crops, and destroyed aqueducts and electric transmission lines.38

  Destruction of La Coubre

  On March 4, 1960, an explosion in Havana harbor destroyed the French freighter La Coubre, killing more than eighty people and wounding more than three hundred. Dockworkers had been unloading from the ship tons of Belgian-made munitions the Cuban government had purchased. Fidel Castro blamed the CIA. The United States denied the charges of CIA involvement, and the cause of the blast has never been determined definitively.* The following day, Castro declared a national day of mourning. At the funeral, he declared for the first time a refrain that became a national slogan, ¡Patria o Muerte, venceremos! (Homeland or Death, we will be victorious!).

  * * *

  * R. Hart Phillips, “Castro Links U.S. to Ship ‘Sabotage’; Denial Is Swift,” New York Times, March 6, 1960, 1; Carlos Alzugaray and Anthony C. E. Quainton, “Cuban-U.S. Relations: The Terrorism Dimension,” Pensamiento Propio, no. 34 (July–December 2011): 72.

  General Fabián Escalante Font, a former head of Cuban counterintelligence, asserts that during the seven-year period, these groups committed 5,780 acts of terror, of which 716 were acts of sabotage against industrial sites.39 While former Batista officers and officials did make up the initial counterrevolutionary units, some wealthy Cubans who had opposed the Batista dictatorship began to take up arms against the new regime as it nationalized more property and increased the distribution of wealth. Veteran journalist Richard Gott identifies an additional
factor leading to counterrevolution: “The old elite . . . was also alarmed by the way in which the Revolution had allowed the black population, hitherto largely invisible, to emerge onto the stage.”40 During a 1996 conference about the Bay of Pigs, exiled militants estimated that there may have been as many as ten thousand armed fighters among the various resistance groups, and one hundred thousand supporters of the counterrevolution.41

  Two of the most important groups were backed by the Catholic Church: the Movement to Recover the Revolution (Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria, or MRR) and the Christian Democratic Movement (Movimiento Demócrata Cristiano, or MDC), both of which began to receive covert funding in 1960 from the CIA. The MRR emerged in December 1959 from the Comandos Rurales, or Rural Commandos, an organization of Catholic activists with an avowed mission to teach literacy to the counterrevolutionaries. Its founder was Manuel Artime Buesa—a lieutenant in the Rural Commandos who previously had been designated to be a provincial agrarian reform manager. But he feared the agrarian reform process would go too far, and hoped to use the MRR as the base to fight for his own vision of a Cuban revolution.42

  By mid-1960, most of the groups were coordinating plans under the umbrella of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (Frente Revolucionario Democrático, or FRD), and the new organization selected Artime, the MRR leader, as its national coordinator. But once the CIA became involved, the autonomy of the Cuban counterrevolutionaries essentially ended. Lino Fernández, a medical doctor and the military commander of the MRR, commented in 1996 that “the idea of calling the internal resistance and giving us control of the Cuban fight was inconceivable to the CIA. The CIA tried to do everything themselves. . . . It was almost—again I speak as a psychiatrist—pathological.”43

  By 1962, Raúl’s organizational success had produced an efficient force that was versatile enough to perform important nonmilitary functions: building roads and infrastructure, helping to distribute goods, and providing for health care, especially important because so many Cuban doctors already had emigrated to the United States. As Hal Klepak explains, Fidel Castro turned to the military for a large number of tasks because he wanted “people he could trust in positions of importance, especially those such as agrarian reform where US and local opposition was soon strong and always vocal.” But given the small size of the FAR, his choices were limited. Klepak notes that as a result, young soldiers “took over portfolios for which they often had little or no training. Loyalty to the comandante and to his revolutionary program counted for more than efficiency in these trying but heady days.”44

  Notes

  1. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 482–83.

  2. Domínguez, Cuba, 198.

  3. Nelson P. Valdés, “The Revolutionary and Political Content of Fidel Castro’s Charismatic Authority,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 28.

  4. Zanetti, Historia Mínima de Cuba, chapter 9. [Authors’ translation.]

  5. Ivor L. Miller, “Religious Symbolism in Cuban Political Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 30.

  6. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” in Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate, ed. Bertram Silverman (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 341–43.

  7. Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” 343–44.

  8. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, 13.

  9. María del Carmen Zabala Argüelles, “Poverty and Vulnerability in Cuba Today,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 191–93.

  10. See, for example, Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Vintage, 1998); Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two Decade Appraisal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 23–32.

  11. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Commemorating the 11th Anniversary of the March 13, 1957, Action Held at the Steps of the University of Havana,” March 13, 1968 [authors’ translation], http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1968/esp/f130368e.html. Also see Julie Marie Buncke, Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

  12. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 482. Also see Bertram Silverman, “Introduction: The Great Debate in Retrospect: Economic Rationality and the Ethics of Revolution,” in Bertram Silverman, ed., Man and Socialism in Cuba (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 15.

  13. Ana Serra, The “New Man” in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the Revolution (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 2–3.

  14. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 384.

  15. Interview with Pablo Armando Fernández, January 8, 1992, Havana, Cuba.

  16. William Luis, “Exhuming Lunes de Revolución,” CR: The New Centennial Review 2, no. 2 (Summer 2002).

  17. Valdés, “The Revolutionary and Political Content of Fidel Castro’s Charismatic Authority,” 30, 32, 34.

  18. Jesús Arboleya, The Cuban Counterrevolution, trans. Rafael Betancourt (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2000), 46, 50; Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso para Respaldar las Nuevas Tarifas Telefonicas y la Intervencion, Efectuada en el Teatro de la CTC,” March 6, 1959, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f060359e.html.

  19. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso como Conclusion de las Reuniones con los Intelectuales Cubanos,” June 16, 23, and 30, 1961.” Translation by the authors. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f300661e.html.

  20. Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs, trans. Anna Kushner (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 70–71.

  21. Domínguez, Cuba, 253.

  22. Larry Oberg, “The Status of Gays in Cuba: Myth and Reality,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Domínguez, Cuba, 356–57.

  23. Betto, Fidel and Religion (Havana: Publications Office of the Council of State, 1987), 194.

  24. Margaret E. Crahan, “Freedom of Worship in Revolutionary Cuba,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988), 212.

  25. Betto, Fidel and Religion, 195.

  26. Joseph Holbrook, “The Catholic Church in Cuba, 1959–1962: The Clash of Ideologies,” International Journal of Cuban Studies 2, no. 3/4 (Autumn/Winter 2010): 270–71.

  27. Saul Landau, “The Confessions of Antonio Veciana,” Counterpunch, March 12, 2010.

  28. María de los Angeles Torres, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US, and the Promise of a Better Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 8.

  29. Thomas, Cuba, 1065–66.

  30. Zanetti, Historia Mínima de Cuba, chapter 9.

  31. Thomas, Cuba, 1197.

  32. Herbert L. Matthews, Revolution in Cuba: An Essay in Understanding (New York: Scribner, 1975), 138–40.

  33. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” October 26, 1959, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f261059e.html; Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con Fidel—1959 (Havana: Fundacion de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, 1998), 323–40.

  34. Domínguez, Cuba, 347.

  35. Hal Klepak, Raúl Castro and Cuba: A Military Story (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 23–26.

  36. Norberto Fuentes, Nos Impusieron la Violencia (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1986).

  37. Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con Fidel—1961 (Havana: Fundacion de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, 1998), 33.

  38. Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con Fidel—1961, 34.

  39. Fabían Escalante Font, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations against Cuba, 1959–1962, trans. Maxine Shaw (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), 152.

  40. Gott, Cuba, 172.

  41. James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs In
vasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 19–21.

  42. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 174–75; US Congress, House Select Committee on Assassination, 1979. “Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” vol. X: Appendix to Hearings, March, 7.

  43. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 13.

  44. Hal Klepak, “The Revolutionary Armed Forces: Loyalty and Efficiency in the Face of Old and New Challenges,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 74.

  Chapter 10

  Consolidating the Revolution

  Economic Reforms, New Institutions, and Basic Needs

  No Road Map to Guide Plans for Development with Equity

  US vice president Richard M. Nixon was prepared to encounter anti-US demonstrations when he traveled to eight South American countries on a goodwill tour in April and May 1958. After all, the purpose of the trip was to assuage some of the hostility toward the United States that had been growing in the region.1 But he was not expecting the depth of antagonism he experienced in Venezuela on May 13, when four thousand people attacked his motorcade with rocks, eggs, tomatoes, and spit. With only twelve Secret Service agents to protect him, demonstrators nearly succeeded in turning over his car.