Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Figure 14.1. Toilet factory in Holguín that opened in 1979. Cuban officials in the 1970s regarded their ability to produce light industry goods, which previously were imported, as an important developmental advance. Photo by Philip Brenner.

  Attraction, not coercion, was the principal means the government used to shape Cuba’s human geography. While the policy did include some legal restrictions on a person’s free movement—through the use of work and residency permits—its essential character was humane. Many decisions would not have passed muster if they were based solely on a cost-benefit analysis.

  In addition to guaranteeing year-round employment to farmers, some of the unemployment rampant in rural areas was absorbed by new construction—roads, electric lines, and sewage disposal—and new social services. Stipends provided to encourage people to attend school also removed some people from the workforce. There were also agricultural experiments that officials hoped would contribute to rural development.

  For example, Fidel gave his elder brother, Ramón Castro Ruz, the task of developing dairy cows that could survive in the tropics. While Cebú cattle were best suited to the Cuban climate, a Cebú produces no more than six liters of milk a day. Holsteins, in contrast, produce more than thirty liters daily. Crossbreeding led to the development of an “H4 cow,” a hybrid that could thrive in the tropical climate and produce twice as much milk as a Cebú.

  Adjusting to the Soviet System

  Ten-Million-Ton Sugar Harvest Fails

  Between 1967 and 1970 the dream of true Cuban independence died two deaths. First came the assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia. Che had inspired Cubans to believe that his magnetic persona and foco theory (the idea that a small group could spark revolution in a country where the population is downtrodden) could bring the third world into an alliance with Cuba. The second came in 1970 with the failure of the ten-million-ton sugar harvest, which sent an unmistakable message that Cuba would need to defer achieving economic independence. Cuba’s leaders perceived that the Revolution’s only chance of survival rested with the Soviet trading bloc.

  Recall from the previous chapter that Fidel had promised in January 1968 that Cuba would be free from foreign dictates if it harvested ten million tons of sugar in 1970. Journalist Richard Gott aptly characterized the plan as a quixotic effort “to defeat the laws of nature and economics.”8 Neither Cuba nor any other country had ever produced so much sugar in one year. The 1968 harvest had been only 3.7 million tons. Still, the “battle for sugar” captured the public’s imagination and engaged a large portion of the population in a chaotic, almost festive endeavor. Vacations were curtailed, land intended for other crops was given over to sugar, factories reduced output as workers took to the fields, and schools closed early. This meant that even if the ten-million-ton goal had been reached, it would have been a pyrrhic victory. In the process of trying to produce ten million tons of sugar, the country compromised much of what it needed for future development. And Cuba harvested only 8.5 million metric tons of sugar in 1970.

  On July 26, in front of hundreds of thousands of assembled Cubans, Castro acknowledged the fault was his. “We are going to begin,” he declared, “by pointing out the responsibility that all of us, and I in particular, have for these problems.”9 Then, dramatically, he offered to resign his post as prime minister (he also served as commander in chief of the armed forces and general secretary of the PCC). “No,” a few hundred people shouted, in a rejoinder that was not quite an affirmation of his leadership. “The people can replace us any time they wish,” he said plaintively. The chants grew louder and louder: “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel.” He then consented to the crowd’s wishes and stayed on.10

  Cuba Joins the Soviet Trading Bloc

  Cuba expected no help from the United States or China. With only one option left, Cuba accepted an offer to join the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), a planned common market made up of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries. CMEA members had assigned responsibilities for the production of particular commodities and industrialized products that would be exchanged in an almost barter-like fashion with all the others. Cuba’s role was predictably agricultural. It was designated as producer of sugar and citrus for the trading group, with the tobacco crop as an auxiliary product.

  A Brief Respite

  As Cuba’s integration into the CMEA was getting under way, sugar prices began to rise dramatically. In 1974, the world market price of sugar rose to $0.65 per pound. It had been about $0.04 per pound only four years earlier.* Though Cuba was the world’s largest sugar producer, it had fixed price contracts with the Soviet-bloc trading system that prevented it from selling most of its output at the higher price. Still, the sixteen-fold jump in prices enabled Cuba to buy higher-quality products from Western Europe, such as milking machines, and to rev up one of its prize projects—a world-class pharmaceutical industry—by purchasing medical equipment from Nordic countries, mostly Sweden. Cuba also was able to use the bounty of hard currency to buy food and medicines from US corporations based in Latin America, because in 1975 the Ford administration relaxed the embargo on sales to Cuba from US subsidiaries in other countries. Cuba also bought US air conditioners from Canada and Dodge and Ford taxis from Argentina. But the period of high sugar revenues was short-lived. The price of sugar collapsed to less than ten cents per pound within two years.

  * * *

  * Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization, revised edition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 57.

  The task of retooling the Cuban economy, so that it could use CMEA products, was vast. Consider the matter of spare parts for existing machinery, including the famous 1940s and 1950s American automobiles of Havana. Spare parts now had to come from Eastern Europe; screws, bolts, nails, and all implements would be sized with metric calibrations. And the automobiles were no longer Chevrolets and Fords, but Polish and Russian Fiats that were built under the brand name Lada. For Cubans, the brand name became a common joke, because Lada sounds much like the Spanish word lata, which means tin.

  Indeed, Ladas were tinny and of low quality. Similarly, refrigerators and washers produced in Eastern Europe were inferior to US products. Cubans did not only feel they were receiving lower-quality goods. The upheaval was cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive. They also realized that refitting from a Western to a Soviet system meant that crossing back to a higher standard in the future would be equally difficult, and would make establishing economic independence from those countries less likely.

  Did Dependency on the Soviet Union Replace Cuba’s Dependency on the United States?

  Cuba’s economy had been so closely tied to the United States before 1959 that the island lacked meaningful independence or sovereignty. The resulting dependency had four components:

  Trade: Cuba relied on the United States to purchase 75 percent of the island’s exports and about the same percent of its imports came from its northern neighbor.

  Terms of trade: The income Cuba received for the commodities it sold to the United States (mainly sugar) often did not cover the cost of the finished products and basic necessities it purchased from the United States, which meant there was little available for development.

  Loans: Without sufficient hard currency to import basic necessities, Cuba relied on loans from the United States and Canada that had to be repaid in hard currency. This further tied it to North America in a subservient position.

  Ownership: US companies owned or controlled a majority of Cuba’s basic industries, railroads, communications, and banks. Using a variety of loopholes that they designed, they tended to pay far less in taxes than required by law, which also made funds for development scarce.

  This pattern of dependency was common between third world countries and their former colonial rulers. Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley described the dilemma
his country faced in the early 1970s with respect to sugar, its primary export. The sugar prices rarely went up, he wrote, but the price of manufactured goods generally rose. As a result, he explained, “it took more and more sugar to buy a tractor, a turbine or a motor car. However, the limits imposed by geography . . . make it impossible to produce more and more sugar.”11

  As a member of the CMEA, Cuba largely escaped the declining terms of trade other poor countries suffered, because the cost of imports from the Soviet bloc were based on long-term commitments, not market prices, which also reflected a subsidy from the Soviet Union. In fact, the subsidies gave Cuba a favorable balance of trade with the Soviet Union, which contrasted with the unfavorable balance it had maintained with the United States.12 Moreover, the Soviets provided long-term loans to Cuba, many of which were “forgiven” when Cuba could not repay them, and the Soviet Union did not own any part of Cuba’s productive facilities.

  In short, while Cuba’s trade with the Soviet bloc did limit its independence, the dependent relationship with the Soviet bloc was less extensive and exploitative than its relationship with the United States had been. Membership in the CMEA actually provided the revolutionary government with enough resources to resume the pursuit of equity.

  Advancing Equality

  Income and Benefits

  On October 18, 1967, at a massive memorial service for Che Guevara, Fidel Castro called on Cubans to emulate the fallen hero. To be a revolutionary, he intoned, “we must say without any hesitation, ‘Be like Che’” (¡Que sean como el Che!).13 The slogan became a standard that few, if any, Cubans could emulate, but it conveyed a commitment to fight selflessly for equity and independence. In practice, Communist Party and government officials did live in modest houses, sent their children to the same schools as ordinary workers, and relied on common doctors and hospitals available to anyone at no cost. Echoing the slogan, the Cuban government in the 1960s and 1970s dedicated itself to providing social services for everyone in the country, including a livable old-age pension and guaranteed health care. The extreme poverty evident during the Batista years disappeared.

  Yet starting in the 1970s, a small degree of inequality was allowed with the introduction of modest material incentives. Work centers received a limited number of refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, or Ladas. On the basis of everyone’s job performance, which the workers themselves evaluated, the best workers were permitted to purchase one of the items with a long-term no-interest loan. New apartments were made available in the same manner.

  Housing distribution, though, involved an additional element—“voluntary” labor, called “microbrigades,” made up of about thirty people each from a work center. Those in a microbrigade took leave from their regular employment to participate in construction full-time, and the work center received 40 percent of the units that its microbrigade built. In a sense, everyone in a workplace participated, because the remaining employees made up for lost productivity by putting in overtime. The construction workers were not necessarily rewarded with an apartment.

  New housing units were allotted by a democratic vote of all the workers. In 1972 and 1973, the efforts of microbrigades generated 65 percent of all new housing units produced in the country. Microbrigades were a way to compensate for the shortage of skilled construction workers, and they used prefabricated concrete slabs to build lifeless Soviet-designed units often more appropriate for Moscow winters than the tropics.14

  Alamar was the largest housing project constructed by microbrigades (see photo in figure 14.2). Intended to house 120,000 presidents, the project included day care centers, sports facilities, polyclinics, and boarding schools. Facing the sea just to the east of Havana, Alamar is located on land that had been designated before 1959 for wealthy investors. Today, it houses about 60,000 people.

  Figure 14.2. Children outside their school with Alamar apartment buildings in the background. Photo by Philip Brenner.

  Education

  After the National Literacy Campaign, the government set a new goal beyond universal basic literacy—everyone should have at least a sixth-grade education. Classrooms were created in factories so that laborers could advance their education at lunch or after work. The government built new universities so that there was at least one in every province on the island. In the 1970s, it initiated an ambitious but controversial project based on a utopian socialist vision of breaking down barriers between manual and intellectual labor—the secondary school in the countryside, la Escuela Secundaria Basica en el Campo (ESBEC).15

  ESBECs were boarding schools at which students would devote part of their day to agricultural labor, learning how to cultivate, plant, and harvest crops. They spent the other part of the day learning traditional secondary school subjects. The program was intended to address several issues. One was the long-standing urban denigration of campesinos and rural life. A second was the shortage of agricultural workers. The government turned over much of Cuba’s citrus production in the 1970s to these schools. Third, the schools provided relief to families who were experiencing food shortages or tight housing arrangements, and as a consequence, the schools also could improve the health of Cuba’s next generation by giving students proper nutrition. In addition, the schools attempted to give Cuban youth a sense of ownership in the Revolution—that they and their families felt they were contributing to society in a personal way.

  A skeptic might view the ESBECs as an attempt to indoctrinate a new generation of loyal communists and to undermine the centrality of families in Cuban culture. But the Cuban government did not take young children forcibly from their parents, as Operation Peter Pan claimed the revolutionaries would do. Rather, a family’s decision to send an adolescent to an ESBEC was voluntary; the schools began at grade seven, a point when children already would have been imbued with family values, and students were provided with free transportation to go home for the weekend (see ESBEC students getting ready to travel home in figure 14.3).

  Figure 14.3. Students at an ESBEC boarding school prepare to go home for the weekend. Photo by Philip Brenner.

  Today, most of the boarding schools have been closed down as fewer students have enrolled. Those still functioning are specialty schools in each Cuban province—schools for aspiring athletes and others for gifted students—called “vocational schools,” such as the prestigious Lenin School for Exact Sciences in Havana’s suburbs, which requires a difficult entrance exam and admits only the very top scorers.

  In some ways, the ESBEC project mimicked the kind of education well-to-do Cubans provided for their children before the Revolution by sending them to boarding schools. Fidel and Raúl Castro’s father, for example, enrolled them in the prestigious Belén Jesuit Preparatory School in Havana, hundreds of miles from their home. However, given the ESBECs’ emphasis on manual labor, a closer analogy is the education provided in early Israeli kibbutzim, where children lived apart from the parents during the week. The ESBECs and kibbutzim also shared a philosophical approach to education espoused by John Dewey, an American educator who championed “experiential education” as a basis for fully developing human potential.

  Cuba’s advances in education from 1959 to 1980 are evident from several indicators. The percentage of children 13–16 years of age enrolled in school increased from about 6 to 82 percent. Per pupil spending in this period grew from twelve pesos per student to one hundred thirty-seven pesos.16 In 1959, there were only three universities in the country, all in provincial capitals. By 1980, there were thirty-nine. Day care centers for children as young as two months old became available for a large proportion of the population. Today, every Cuban family has access to free day care.

  Health Care

  Fidel Castro long displayed an idiosyncratic bias in favor of medical doctors. Many of his confidants and top aides—such as Che Guevara—had been formally trained as physicians. Even though training nurse practitioners and
physician’s assistants would have enabled Cuba to expand its capacity to provide health care more quickly, the Cuban leader placed an emphasis on educating doctors. Medical education was free, but students had to agree to work in underserved, mainly rural, areas for the first three years after their training. By 1974, the number of doctors per capita had returned roughly to prerevolutionary levels, and they were distributed evenly throughout Cuba. (By 2000, Cuba was ranked first in Latin America for doctors, nurses, and hospital beds per capita.)17

  The departure of so many medical professionals at the start of the Revolution might have produced a health care disaster. Thus, the improvement in Cubans’ health during the first two decades after 1959 is all the more remarkable. In emphasizing preventive medical practices, and charging Cubans nothing for medical services or pharmaceuticals, the government raised the level of health in the country by the end of the 1970s to that of an advanced industrial country. At the same time, it built full-service polyclinics in rural areas, increased the number of hospitals, and targeted several diseases for immunization campaigns in addition to polio, mentioned in chapter 10. Rural-urban disparities in health indicators were virtually eliminated. As a way to encourage communities to engage in their own health improvement, polyclinics had a democratic aspect similar to community health centers in the United States. Each polyclinic was required to include community representatives on its advisory board. Sociologist Julie Feinsilver explains that such participation creates “greater social cohesion and allows non-administrators and non-health workers a voice in polyclinic operations.”18