Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Figure 18.1. Cubans attempt to leave the island on makeshift rafts in 1994. Photo by Willy Castellanos: “La Regata” (The Regatta); from The Series “North Bound, beyond The Blue Wall,” 1994.

  The situation already was getting beyond control in July 1994 when two Cuban Coast Guard tugboats rammed a hijacked tugboat in Havana harbor, drowning thirty-two balseros. On August 4, forty-one died after the Coast Guard used high-pressure hoses to stop a ferry that the rafters had commandeered. In response, on August 5, more than one thousand people joined a series of spontaneous street demonstrations not seen in Havana since the end of 1958.

  An incensed Fidel Castro blamed the exodus on US encouragement of the rafters, and he warned that Cuba would stop preventing émigrés from departing illegally if the United States continued to welcome them and facilitate their movement. Indeed, Radio Martí, the US propaganda radio station beamed at Cuba, regularly broadcast bulletins about the suitability for travel by small boats in the Florida Straits. In addition, as Cuban sociologist Ernesto Rodríguez Chávez observed, the United States had welcomed “those arriving in July and August, 1994, after stealing boats, using violence, endangering the lives of people who did not wish to emigrate, and even committing murder.”34

  Until that point, it had been US policy to rescue rafters in the Florida Straits and bring them safely to shore. Émigrés would then claim political asylum, and after one year under the terms of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act were able to secure permanent resident status. However, the Clinton administration feared that in light of Cuba’s economic turmoil, the existing policy could lead to a massive influx of refugees, perhaps even greater than the 1980 Mariel exodus.

  On August 19, 1994, the US president announced a new policy under which Cubans picked up at sea would be transported to Guantánamo Naval Base where the US Coast Guard already had sent more than twenty thousand recent Cuban rafters who were living in makeshift housing and eating C-rations for their meals. In September, the United States and Cuba signed a new immigration accord, permitting at least twenty thousand Cubans to obtain visas through a lottery system or family reunification regulations, though the Guantánamo balseros could not apply for visas.

  In 1994, about 39,000 Cubans successfully entered the United States by using rafts. But twice as many may have died in the attempt, swamped by waves or swept away in the ocean. The new exiles were strikingly different from the first group who left Cuba immediately after the Revolution. While only 15 percent of the 1959–1962 group of émigrés had held semiskilled, unskilled, or service jobs in Cuba, 58 percent of those arriving in the mid-1990s held positions in those categories. It was an indicator that the poorest in Cuba suffered the most during the early days of the Special Period.

  Reorganizing the Cuban Economy

  The rafter exodus and popular demonstrations shocked Cuba’s leaders. The 1993 economic reforms were not producing change fast enough. Cuba needed foreign investment beyond the tourism industry. It also needed to find a way to import less food and produce more of it on the island.

  Foreign Investment

  Cuba’s record of expropriations and failure to repay foreign loans in a timely manner contributed to the reluctance many European companies shared about investing in Cuba. Yet the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was an even greater obstacle. Private international financing often depended on a country first receiving the IMF’s seal of approval. As the fund’s largest shareholder, the United States most often determined decisions, and it opposed any dealing with Cuba. In turn, Cuba refused to be a member of the IMF.

  While sugar had been Cuba’s main export for two centuries, the more meaningful potential for development rested with its nickel reserves. The worldwide demand for nickel was growing in the 1990s because it is essential for producing corrosion-resistant alloys such as stainless steel and was used as a component in many batteries. Cuba has the world’s fifth largest reserves, with deposits thirty-four times greater than those in the United States.35 It also has petroleum deposits that could have reduced its import needs. But its antiquated equipment hampered the extraction of both nickel and oil.

  Until 1991, Cuba exported all of its nickel and cobalt to the Soviet Union for refining. But after successfully wooing Canada’s Sherritt International to modernize operations at the decrepit Moa nickel mine facility, Cuba began to earn money from nickel exports. By 2001, it was the world’s sixth largest producer of nickel and accounted for 10 percent of the world’s cobalt, a byproduct in the nickel extraction process.36

  Meanwhile, with the end of subsidized oil shipments from the Soviet Union, Cuba began serious exploration for crude oil and gas. Between 1994 and 2000, production doubled to nearly 50,000 barrels of crude oil per day, about 25 percent of its daily consumption.37 Cuba also signed agreements with several foreign companies—Brazil’s Petrobras, Venezuela’s PDVSA, China’s Sinopec, India’s OVL/ONGC, Spain’s Repsol-YPF, and Canada’s Sherritt—to begin deep-water oil and gas exploration off Cuba’s northern coast.

  While the efforts to attract foreign capital led to accumulated investments of just over $2 billion by 2001, the GDP at that point was still 18 percent lower than it had been in 1990, at the start of the Special Period, and annual totals fluctuated widely.38 However, the government’s determination to capture hard currency did result in a notable success. By 2002, Cuba was keeping sixty-eight cents from every dollar that tourists spent.39

  Food Production

  In late 1993, the Cuban government issued a broad decree that would fundamentally change the basis of agricultural production, breaking up more than two-thirds of state farm enterprises into smaller units that would be given to individuals or run by cooperatives. By 2003, the measure had created 36,000 such cooperatives, named Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPC) (Unidades Básicas de Producción Cooperativa). Within a decade, the UBPCs operated 55 percent of Cuba’s arable land and employed 300,000 people.40

  Under the new regulations, the government permitted both individual farmers and UBPCs to sell whatever they produced beyond the amount they had agreed to deliver to the state. This meant that private farmers could offer their produce at mercados agropecuarios—farmers’ markets—established by the government in late 1994. This incentive-based farming did much more than provide domestically grown food for tourists; it increased the amount of food available for Cubans and undercut the prices they had been paying on the black market.

  At about the same time, Cuban officials opted to turn their shortages into an advantage—“going against the grain” as an Oxfam America report characterized the decision—to promote urban organic farms. Along with its development of cooperatives and farmers’ markets, urban farming constituted an agrarian reform as significant as the nationalization and land distributions that took place from 1959 to 1963.41 The earlier reforms had created large state farms that produced sugar, cattle, citrus, and rice. Even before the Special Period, they had proved to be inefficient, in part because each farm focused on a single commodity, which damaged the soil and caused environmental damage.42

  Urban farms began as a spontaneous response to the problem of food shortages and survival (see an urban farm in figure 18.2). By 2001, such farms generated half of Havana’s fresh produce. Initially, “farms” were small plots located on vacant lots or even in alleys between buildings. Without access to petroleum-based fertilizers and other chemicals, the farmers relied on organic methods because there was no alternative. They used compost to create raised beds, flowers for defense against insects, and fecal matter and decay from worms to fertilize the soil. Because the lack of fuel prevented crops from being transported long distances, growers needed to be close to the point of sale. A environmental movement—“buy local”—that is now becoming popular in the United States emerged in Cuba twenty years ago out of necessity.

  Figure 18.2. An urban farm in Havana. Photo by Doyle L. Niemann.

 
A 1997 law granted urban dwellers the right to cultivate up to 15 percent of a hectare (about one-third of an acre) in plots on the periphery of cities. Within two years the government had distributed such land to nearly 200,000 people.43 Environmentalist Bill McKibben judged in 2005 that the resulting agricultural system “may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth.”44 Indeed, Cuba has become a world leader in the field of agroecology, the “attempt to minimize the use of fossil fuels, including petroleum, and their derivatives, such as chemical pesticides and fertilizers, in production and transportation,” economist Simon Koont reports. He adds, it “is holistic and pays full attention to environmental concerns and to the human participants in their political, economic, social, and cultural settings.”45

  Notes

  1. Robin C. Williams, “In the Shadow of Plenty, Cuba Copes with a Crippled Health Care System,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 281.

  2. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Sixteenth Congress of the CTC,” XVI Congreso de la CTC, January 28, 1990, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1990/esp/f280190e.html.

  3. Pedro Monreal, “Development as an Unfinished Affair: Cuba After the ‘Great Adjustment’ of the 1990s,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 117–19.

  4. Eliana A. Cardoso and Ann Helwege, Cuba After Communism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 31.

  5. Domínguez, To Make the World Safe for Revolution, 90.

  6. Andrew Zimbalist and Howard J. Sherman, Comparing Economic Systems: A Political-Economic Approach (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984), 386.

  7. Donna Rich Kaplowitz and Michael Kaplowitz, New Opportunities for US-Cuban Trade (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 11–13.

  8. Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuba’s Economic Transition: Successes, Deficiencies, and Challenges,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, and Lorena Barberia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19.

  9. Katherine Tucker and Thomas R. Hedges, “Food Shortages and an Epidemic of Optic and Peripheral Neuropathy in Cuba,” Nutrition Reviews 51, no. 12 (1993): 349–57.

  10. Paula Pettavino and Philip Brenner, “More Than Just a Game: The Dual Developmental Aspects of Cuban Sports,” Peace Review 11 no. 4 (December 1999): 527.

  11. Minor Sinclair and Martha Thompson, “Going Against the Grain: Agricultural Crisis and Transformation,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 157.

  12. As quoted in Williams, “In the Shadow of Plenty,” 282–83.

  13. Hal Klepak, “Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces: Last Bulwark of the State! Last Bulwark of the Revolution?” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Klepak, Raúl Castro and Cuba, 57–68

  14. Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide, 214–15.

  15. Lorena Barberia, “Remittances to Cuba: An Evaluation of Cuban and US Government Policy Measures,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 368.

  16. Mayra Paula Espina Prieto, “Social Effects of Economic Adjustment: Equality, Inequality and Trends toward Greater Complexity in Cuban Society,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 219–25.

  17. Mirén Uriarte, “Social Impact of the Economic Measures,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 286.

  18. Uriarte, “Social Impact of the Economic Measures,” 286.

  19. Philip Peters and Joseph L. Scarpaci, “Cuba’s New Entrepreneurs: Five Years of Small-Scale Capitalism” (Arlington, VA: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, August 1998), 7.

  20. William M. LeoGrande and Julie M. Thomas, “Cuba’s Quest for Economic Independence,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34, part 2 (May 2002): 354; Ted Henken, “Vale Todo: In Cuba’s Paladares, Everything Is Prohibited but Anything Goes,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 171–73.

  21. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” Plaza de la Revolucion, Havana, July 26, 1995, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1995/esp/f260795e.html.

  22. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 1993, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1993/esp/f260793e.html.

  23. Elisa Facio, “Jineterismo during the Special Period,” in Cuban Transitions at the Millennium, ed. Eloise Linger and John W. Cotman (Largo, MD: International Development Options, 2000).

  24. Marguerite Rose Jiménez, “The Political Economy of Leisure,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 177.

  25. Philip Peters, “International Tourism: The New Engine of the Cuban Economy,” (Arlington, VA: Lexington Institute, 2002), 7.

  26. Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 205.

  27. Eckstein, Back to the Future, 69, 104.

  28. Schwartz, Pleasure Island, 206.

  29. Thomas L. Friedman, “Soviet Turmoil; Gorbachev Says He’s Ready to Pull Troops Out of Cuba and End Castro’s Subsidies,” New York Times, September 12, 1991, A1.

  30. US Congress, House of Representatives, “Cuban Democracy Act of 1992,” Report from the Committee on Foreign Affairs on H.R. 5253, 102nd Cong., 2nd Sess., House Report 102615, Part 1, June 25, 1992, 1.

  31. Comments to the Cuba Study Group, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, May 13, 1993.

  32. Tom Fiedler, “Clinton Backs Torricelli Bill: ‘I Like It,’ He Tells Cuban Exiles,” Miami Herald, April 24, 1992, A1.

  33. Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 137–41.

  34. Ernesto Rodríguez Chávez, “La crisis migratoria . . .” as quoted in Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the US, 1959–1995 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 138.

  35. US Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey, “Mineral Commodity Summaries 2015,” January 2015, 109.

  36. Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Economic Development: The Cuban Experience,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 180–81.

  37. A. Alhajji and Terry L. Maris, “The Future of Cuba’s Energy Sector,” in Cuba Today: Continuity and Change since the “Periodo Expecial,” ed. Mauricio A. Font (New York: Bildner Center, CUNY, 2004).

  38. Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuba’s Economic Transition: Successes, Deficiencies, and Challenges,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19–20; Paolo Spadoni, Failed Sanctions: Why the US Embargo Against Cuba Could Never Work (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 67–68.

  39. Peters, “International Tourism,” 7.

  40. Frederick S. Royce, “Agricultural Production Cooperatives: The Future of Cuban Agriculture,” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 14, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 20.

  41. Minor Sinclair and Martha Thompson, Cuba, Going Against the Grain: Agricultural Crisis and Transformation (Boston: Oxfam America, 2001), 19.

  42. Sinan Koont, “Cuba’s Recent Em
brace of Agroecology: Urban and Suburban Agriculture,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 399.

  43. Sinclair and Thompson, Cuba, Going Against the Grain, 23.

  44. Bill McKibben, “The Cuba Diet: What Will You Be Eating When the Revolution Comes?” Harper’s Magazine 310, issue 1859 (April 2005): 62.

  45. Koont, “Cuba’s Recent Embrace of Agroecology,” 399–400.

  Chapter 19

  The Cuban Diaspora and Racial Inequality

  My father’s family came to Cuba from Spain in the 1800s and settled in Bayamo, Oriente, where the family had rice plantations. I was born in Havana, went to Bayamo at the age of six months and stayed there until the age of five, when I started attending Havana’s most elite academy, the Sacred Heart School run by French nuns.

  My mother’s family arrived in Cuba from Spain in the 1700s, settling in Matanzas. The family was very wealthy; my grandfather’s grandfather established the first sugar refinery on the Island. My grandfather was born in Cárdenas but was educated in the United States. His aunt and uncle—Emilia and Miguel Teurbe Tolón—created the Cuban flag. They were very nationalistic and against Spain because of the colonial system’s abuses. Sugar gave them close ties to the United States, and they aligned themselves with the United States. Emilia was the first woman to have been expelled from Cuba for political reasons. The Spaniards had expelled Miguel before her and she joined him in New York.

  It was there in 1849 that Narciso López, a Spanish general, asked Miguel to design the flag and Emilia to sew it. Gen. López had sought recruits and financing in the United States in order to invade Cuba, with the goal of freeing the country from Spain.