Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  A shocked President Eisenhower then sent his brother, Milton Eisenhower, to the region to discern the root cause of such vehement anti-Americanism. In a report released on December 27, 1958—four days before Batista fled Cuba—Dr. Eisenhower provided a stark picture of despair and turbulence, much of which could have described Cuba as well:

  Latin America is a continental area in ferment. While its productivity is increasing, so is its population, at an unprecedented rate. A high degree of illiteracy, poverty, and dependence on one-commodity economies with consequent wide fluctuations in income still characterize most of this vast area. But the people generally, including the most humble of them, now know that low standards of living are neither universal nor inevitable, and they are therefore impatiently insistent that remedial actions be taken.2

  In terms of standard indicators such as per capita income, literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy, Cuba actually ranked among the top five countries in Latin America.3 But it was hardly thriving. Most Cubans suffered from declining real wages as the cost of basic goods increased faster than wages, which contributed to a growing and unsustainable income gap between rich and poor. More than 40 percent of Cuban workers in 1958 were either underemployed or unemployed (the official unemployment rate in 1958 was 16 percent).4

  Recall from chapter 6 that sugar cane workers made up approximately 25 percent of the national labor force, and averaged less than four months of work each year. Cuba’s literacy rate was only 75 percent while thousands of teachers were unemployed. Advanced medical services were concentrated in Havana and unavailable to most Cubans. Inequities between the rich and poor were reflected not only in housing, education, health care, and other basic services, but more generally in the aspirations of urban and rural Cubans.

  Look at Me

  On a trip through rural Matanzas Province in 1974, Philip Brenner stopped unannounced late one afternoon at the home of a farm worker. His house had a thatched roof with sides and floors made of wooden boards. In front, there was a small garden featuring a banana and a lemon tree. A tall, thin man with a broad, toothless grin opened the door. Inside, his two young children played with friends in the eight-by-ten-foot entrance hallway that served as the living room. His wife was in the kitchen at the back of the living room. After some chitchat, Brenner began his questioning in the manner of a probing investigative reporter. Did the man support the Cuban revolution? Brenner asked. A blank stare. The thin man blinked his eyes. He could not fathom the stupidity of the question. “Look at me,” he began calmly. He was thirty-five but looked a haggard sixty-year-old. “Look at my healthy children,” he exclaimed. “Look at this house—it has solid walls and a floor.” The government provided the wood, nails, and tools; he and his neighbors built the house in a weekend. He and his wife had their own bedroom. There is a paved road in front of their house, a school to which their children can walk in five minutes, and a medical clinic nearby that obviously did not exist when the man was growing up in this area. “Yes, I support the Cuban revolution.” He smiled.

  Figure 10.1. Campesino husband, wife, two daughters, and their friends, Matanzas Province, 1974. Photo by Philip Brenner.

  There was no map to guide the revolutionaries, no example of a poor country that had been able to achieve both sustained economic growth and an end to inequality in a short time. One possibility was a strategy called “import-substitution industrialization” (ISI) to which several Latin American countries had been attracted. It was based on the premise that third world countries remained poor because advanced capitalist nations took advantage of them in their trade relationships: the richer countries purchased commodities (coffee, sugar, copper, wood, rubber, and the like) at low and declining prices, and in turn sold finished products using these commodities back to the poorer countries at increasingly higher prices. One solution to this structural disadvantage seemed to be for the poor countries to produce industrial products themselves. In fact, ISI was the strategy the United States followed in its early days in order to overcome its dependency on Great Britain, which purchased the largest share of US agricultural exports such as cotton and had been the main source of finished goods imported by the United States.

  While no Latin American country had been successful in using the ISI strategy, it was the most attractive model to the new Cuban leaders. They believed that the fundamental obstacle to the country’s economic growth was its reliance on sugar for export earnings and its dependent relationship with the United States. In addition, they were not enamored of the rigid Soviet model of state planning and centralized control, or the Chinese model of extreme collectivization. Those models seemed inapplicable to Cuba. Both of these large countries had populations vastly greater than Cuba’s, and possessed natural resources—especially sources of energy—that enabled them to rely less on imports than Cuba did.

  Yet the revolutionary government chose to institute other changes before diversifying what Cuba produced and reducing what it needed to import. These reforms created a dynamic that ultimately limited the options Cuba could choose in attempting to advance growth with equity.

  Major Economic and Social Changes

  Agrarian Reform Law

  Land reform had been a high priority for the July 26th Movement because of the high concentration of land ownership in Cuba. Only twenty-two latifundio (plantations) controlled more than 70 percent of the land used for producing sugar.5 But the aim of redistributing property was hardly a novel or even radical objective. Cuba’s Ortodoxo Party had long advocated land reform. In the early 1960s, the Alliance for Progress, a hemisphere-wide development program that the United States spearheaded, sought to break up large plantations in Latin America and distribute land to individual farmers. Defending the Alliance’s goals on its first anniversary in 1962, President John F. Kennedy declared, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”6

  In May 1959, the revolutionary government announced an Agrarian Reform Law that limited the maximum landholding size to one thousand acres.7 The government parceled out land in excess of that acreage to farm workers. About 100,000 rural farm workers each received sixty-six acres free under this “land-to-the-tiller” program.8 At the same time, the government took control of 40 percent of Cuba’s rural property, creating large state farms. Workers on state farms received a salary throughout the year, which significantly raised their standard of living.

  Instituting land reform also involved the creation of new towns in the countryside. From 1959 to 1962, the government built eighty-three towns, each with three hundred to five hundred residents. The settlements offered basic services, such as schools and health care, that previously only had been found in urban areas. Indeed, the goal of agrarian reform was not merely redistribution of land. “Fidel and his comrades,” according to Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, the first head of the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA) and a Fidel Castro confidant, were concerned about “the precarious health of the peasants,” which they reasoned was a consequence of a lack of adequate sanitation, electricity, and communications in the countryside.9 Sociologist Susan Eckstein notes that in 1958 “less than ten percent of rural homes had electricity, and less than three percent had indoor plumbing.” In all of Cuba’s rural areas, there were only three general hospitals.10

  At the same time, rents for most urban dwellers were cut by 50 percent as the government limited what a landlord could charge for an apartment. It also required Cubans owning more than two properties to hand over the excess to the government, which then classified them as social property. Large houses, for example, were transformed into day care centers. In October 1960, under the Urban Reform Law, the government took over all rental property and established that rent would be no more than 10 percent of a tenant’s income.

  By the end of 1960, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population had lost nearly all of their property, privile
ges, and political power. They were forced to pay new luxury taxes; their private schools and clubs were closed; private beaches were opened to the public; private clinics were forced to treat indigent patients. In turn, the lower classes—especially urban Afro-Cubans and all those in rural areas—received immediate benefits because historically they had suffered the greatest unemployment and had received the fewest public services.

  Making Lemonade from a Lemon

  The 1959 Agrarian Reform Law proved to be a turning point for the Cuban elite. A few began to organize themselves to wage a counterrevolutionary war against the new government. Many others voted with their feet, leaving Cuba. The emigration of skilled Cubans affected the Revolution in both negative and positive ways. On the one hand, the loss of doctors, teachers, and technicians deprived the country of essential expertise needed for development. With novices replacing experienced government planners and administrators, key services became unavailable or were provided poorly. Militants who were barely into their twenties and accustomed to guerrilla informality quickly found themselves overwhelmed by bureaucratic rules and impossible goals. As output dropped, the resulting serious shortage of foreign exchange prevented the government from importing goods that could provide for basic needs.

  Death of a Bureaucrat

  In his 1966 film, Death of a Bureaucrat, acclaimed Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea mocked bureaucratic logjams Cubans were experiencing. When an exemplary worker dies, his family honors his dedication by burying him with his worker identification card. Problems arise when they need the ID in order to obtain a new ration card to purchase food. The sons opt to exhume their father’s body to obtain the card. But before they can return the cadaver to its grave, a policeman wanders by, and so they run off with it to their home. When they try formally to return the body, an official tells them that it cannot be reburied because there was no record of the dead man being exhumed. In one evocative scene, an uncle attempts to locate a supervisor in a large office building to solve the problem. Arriving at midday, he encounters empty offices, rows of file cabinets, and a lone man with a broom, fruitlessly sweeping a hallway strewn with papers flying all around.

  On the other hand, emigration gave the revolutionaries opportunities to make lemonade from this lemon, to turn the loss into a positive for the Revolution. Migration removed opponents who might have challenged the revolutionary government had they stayed on the island, and it created a safety valve that released pressure, which might have animated potential opponents to organize themselves if the possibility of leaving did not exist.11

  With this class of Cubans gone, the government could more easily forge ahead with programs that would benefit a large majority of Cubans. As a result, enthusiasm was partly able to substitute for expertise. Cubans of all ages willingly put in extra hours doing voluntary work as they shared in a common national experience to develop the country together. Everyone became a teacher, sharing personal knowledge with someone less knowledgeable. Sixth graders taught third graders and retired doctors taught medical students who, in turn, trained new nurses. The most well known example of this phenomenon was the National Literacy Campaign.

  Educational Change

  Fidel Castro announced the literacy campaign in a UN address on September 26, 1960, setting a goal “of teaching every single inhabitant of the country to read and write in one year.” This followed on what already had been a determined effort to direct resources toward educating children. Elementary school enrollment jumped between 1958 and 1960 from 625,000 to more than one million. The number of schoolteachers in the country increased by nearly 50 percent to 24,400; in rural areas, the number doubled to more than 10,000. At the same time, the government built as many new rural classrooms as prior governments had created in total during the prior fifty years.12

  The ambitious effort to educate illiterate Cubans—to enable everyone to read minimally at a first-grade level—mobilized nearly 250,000 people, including 100,000 students mostly between the ages of ten and seventeen, inspired by what Jonathan Kozol described as “a kind of ‘ethical exhilaration.’”13 Young brigadistas were trained for a few weeks and then sent off throughout the country, typically living with a family where there was an illiterate person.14 This mode of teaching served many purposes.

  There was a pedagogical rationale for the approach. Abel Prieto, who later became minister of culture, explained in 1981 that “an illiterate is usually embarrassed when another person thinks that he or she is ignorant. So it is better to put the literacy worker into the house of the illiterate,” that is, into a comfortable environment rather than a traditional classroom.15 Indeed, a brigade’s first task was to determine who lacked literacy in an area because embarrassment kept people from identifying themselves as such. The campaign ultimately determined there were 980,000 illiterate adults out of the approximately four million adults in the country. When the National Literacy Campaign ended after one year, Cuba’s literacy rate had skyrocketed to 96.1 percent, the highest in Latin America. Many Cubans were grateful for the campaigns efforts, as shown in the letter presented in figure 10.4.

  Literacy Campaign

  The teachers’ manual, Alfabeticemos (Let Us Teach Literacy), included guidelines (orientaciones) for helping the brigadistas work effectively with rural Cubans. “Remember,” it cautions, “that many students have vision and hearing defects that can make learning difficult.”* It also included brief lessons about the goals of the Revolution and problems Cuba faced (see cover and table of contents in figures 10.2 and 10.3), as well as a glossary of political terms. The curriculum in the students’ workbook, ¡Venceremos! (We Shall Overcome!), included some revolutionary sloganeering (“The fishermen’s cooperative helps the fisherman. The fisherman is no longer exploited.”). Exercises involved writing, using words in simple sentences, and repeating key words to teach pronunciation.

  Figure 10.2. Cover

  Figure 10.3. Table of contents

  * * *

  * Alfabeticemos: Manual para el Alfabetizador, Comisión Nacional de Alfabetización, Ministerio de Educacion, Cuba, 1961 (copy in possession of the authors).

  Figure 10.4. Letter from Julia Reyes Rodríguez to Prime Minister Fidel Castro Ruz, written at the end of the 1961 Literacy Campaign; archived in the Museum of the Literacy Campaign, Havana, Cuba. Photo by Sonya Grier. Translation by the authors: Guanajay December 6, 1961, Dr Fidel Castro Ruz, Thank you very much for having said that no Cuban should be left without learning to read because I knew nothing and now I learned. Homeland or death we shall be victorious. Julia Reyes Rodríguez

  The literacy campaign also served political objectives. By involving so many people—the people who acquired literacy and their families, the teachers and their families, and communities—it provided an example of a collective effort that proved successful. The curriculum offered a way of spreading the Revolution’s ideas to the countryside, and it helped the teachers to develop a revolutionary consciousness. It also gave the urban brigadistas an understanding about rural poverty that the Revolution was committed to eradicating, as well as a meaningful experience with rural workers, which helped to break down negative stereotypes.

  Improving Health Care

  Cuba has been acclaimed as a model for providing excellent health care for all its citizens.16 While the revolutionary government deserves credit for extending comprehensive care beyond the larger cities, such as Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and Camagüey, the country’s health indicators in 1958 already were above average for Latin America. Previous governments also had established a national public health service and a few mutual aid cooperatives that functioned like health maintenance organizations.

  This structure provided a basis for the revolutionary government to launch an effort in 1962 to eradicate polio. Within one year, “Cuba became the first country in the Americas and the second country in the
world to effectively eliminate” the disease, Marguerite Rose Jiménez reports.17 Notably, though, the existing health system alone would not have enabled the country to achieve this feat. Jiménez explains that the Cuban model, which the rest of Latin America adopted in some version, also required central coordination, community mobilization, an extensive public education campaign, and outreach to the entire population. Cuba’s achievement in eradicating polio was made all the more remarkable by the fact that almost two-thirds of the medical professionals—including more than 2,000 of the 6,300 doctors on the island—left the country in the first few years of the Revolution.18

  Providing Adequate Nutrition

  Food was a thornier problem. As noted earlier, Cuba’s colonial relationship with Spain and neocolonial relationship with the United States distorted its agricultural production in favor of a single export crop—sugar—along with tobacco. Small farmers did grow crops for their own subsistence. But even if they had harvested more fruits and vegetables than they consumed, the country lacked distribution networks to get the produce from farms to cities, where the majority of Cubans lived.

  Consider the Cuban diet today. Cubans tend not to favor fish—which is plentiful in the sea around the island—because fish was not traditionally part of a Cuban’s diet. There was no commercial fishing industry before the Revolution, which would have been necessary for deliveries of sufficient quantities in urban areas. As a consequence of its sugar monoculture, Cuba had to use scarce hard currency resources to import food. In the early 1960s, as exports declined so did food imports. Hunger became a serious concern, except for those who could afford to buy imported food.