Part II: Dictatorship and National Revolution – Stuart King continues his review of Cuba: a New History by Richard Gott.
By the 1920’s Cuba had become a virtual political and economic colony of the USA. The Platt Amendment in its constitution allowed for US military intervention when “stability” was threatened, and sugar mills, landed estates, public utilities and many other enterprises were in the hands of US business.
One corrupt regime followed another as the economy, heavily dependent on the world price of sugar, staggered from crisis to crisis, with huge loans being taken out from US banks and government to keep Cuba’s administration afloat and line the politicians own pockets.
Gerardo Machado, elected as Liberal president in 1924, rapidly turned the country into an authoritarian dictatorship. A revolution in 1933, in many ways a rehearsal for Castro’s revolution of 1959, was to bring onto the Cuban scene many of the forces and parties that would determine Cuba’s future.
The basis for the revolution was a deep economic crisis in the country. The world slump had slashed the value of Cuba’s sugar production – from being worth $200 million in 1929 it had crashed to $40 million in 1932. In the summer of 1933, a transport strike turned into a general strike – Machado receiving no support from the US embassy, fled the country. An interim president effectively appointed by the US ambassador inherited a revolutionary situation.
A delegation from the US Foreign Policy Association sent to examine the situation reported, “Within less than a month the number of mills under labour control was estimated at thirty six. Soviets were reported to have been organised at Mabay, Jaronu, Senado, Santa Lucia and other centrals. At various points mill managers were held prisoner by the workers. Labour guards were formed, armed with clubs, sticks and a few revolvers, a red armband serving as uniform. Workers fraternised with the soldiers and police.” (Gott p136)
It was not long before the army joined the revolt. A rebellion led by sergeants broke out at the military headquarters – their leader was Fulgencio Batista, a mulatto (mixed race) sergeant from Oriente. The soldiers were quickly joined by the Student Directorate and a provisional revolutionary government proclaimed.
A leftist professor, Ramon Grau San Martin, was declared president as the head of a leftist coalition government. But as, Gott points out, even while the student revolutionaries stood before cheering crowds on the national palace balcony, Batista had slipped away to a meeting with the US Ambassador!
Grau’s government lasted just four months. It had refused to service the debt on American loans made to Machado; it had nationalised two important US owned sugar mills and had ordered the seizure of the US owned Cuban Electric company. The US government naturally refused it recognition, and Batista, now fully in charge of the army, quickly moved against it – putting in a new President and forcing Grau into exile. A second general strike in 1935 against the new regime was brutally crushed. Batista, who organised the crackdown, was to dominate Cuban politics for the next 25 years – sometimes from behind the scenes, sometimes as president.
Democracy to dictatorship
In the USA, Franklin Roosevelt was President after 1932 and progressive governments were tolerated in Cuba providing they did not threaten the USA’s vital interests. Having defeated the revolutionary movement, Batista was elected president under a new and progressive constitution in 1940 and he was followed in 1944 by Grau, returned from exile, leading the Autentico party.
World war benefited the Cuban economy as it did the rest of Latin America as sugar production in Asia and Europe collapsed, Cuban sugar production expanded and fetched high prices. The “golden age” of progressive Cuban governments, however, did not last long. With the onset of the cold war in 1947, Grau moved rapidly to the right, mirroring events in the USA.
The Communist Party was repressed and the union movement purged of communists. Grau’s right turn led to a split, with Eduardo Chibas leading an Ortodoxo party against him. It was this party, with its claims to represent a link to the radical nationalism of Jose Marti, that Fidel Castro was to join and remain part of until 1956.
By 1952, Batista was back in power, again as a result of a military coup. Much of the 1940 constitution was suspended and Batista presided over a typical Latin American dictatorship, completely corrupt and propped up by US arms and money. Opposition parties and cliques vied with each other to launch armed actions against the regime – Ortodoxos, the faction ridden student movement, even the Autenticos, all attempted to bring Batista down.
On 26 July 1953, a hundred armed guerrillas led by Fidel Castro, most from the youth of the Ortodoxo party, launched an attack on the Moncada barracks. The attack was beaten off with several dead on both sides. Fidel and his younger brother Raul were lucky; they were caught later and taken to police stations, whereas the 70 insurgents seized and taken to Moncada were summarily executed on the orders of Batista.
Fidel and Raul Castro were sentenced to 15 and 13 years in prison. Fidel’s later “write up” of his speech in court, published as the pamphlet “History will absolve me” was pure Ortodoxo nationalism. It called for the re-instatement of the 1940 constitution, land reform, profit-sharing for workers in the sugar industry, and large mining and industrial enterprises, and an end to corruption and expropriation of property and land obtained by fraud. But Castro was also a revolutionary nationalist, he realised these reforms could only be achieved by taking up arms against the dictatorship and if necessary its Washington backers. It was this that led to him falling out with the leaders of the Ortodoxo party in 1956.
The Communist Party
The Communist Party (in 1944 renamed the Popular Socialist Party – PSP) was founded in 1925 at the same time as the Cuban workers’ federation (CNOC). The party had an inauspicious start by trying to do a deal with Machado and called off the general strike in August 1933, just days before the president fled; the workers ignored the party’s call and the CP had to later acknowledge its “error”.
The CP obeyed every twist and turn demanded by Moscow. By the late 1930s, following the popular front strategy of the Stalin-led Comintern, they were seeking a political alliance with Batista. The Comintern declared in 1938 “The people who are working for the overthrow of Batista are no longer acting in the interests of the Cuban people.” By 1940 the CP was supporting Batista for the presidency and two CP members joined his cabinet.
This did not stop the PSP suffering repression during the 1950s under Batista’s dictatorship, although they kept their organisation intact and dominated the trade union organisations. Unlike the revolutionary nationalists, the PSP argued that only peaceful and democratic methods should be used in “the struggle for democracy”. They denounced Castro’s attack on the Moncada barracks as “adventurist” and “putschist”, but this did not save them from being outlawed by Batista immediately after the event and having their papers suppressed.
The guerrilla struggle
The Castro brothers were released in an amnesty after only two years in gaol and soon moved to Mexico to gather forces for another attempt to overthrow Batista under the banner of the July 26th Movement (J26M). There they were joined by the Argentinian Che Guevara, a revolutionary much more sympathetic to Marxism and who had experienced first hand a CIA backed invasion of Guatemala in order to overthrow the reforming Arbenz government in 1954.
Having obtained funds from his Ortodoxo contacts and a boat, the Granma, Castro and 82 guerrillas set off for Cuba in November 1956. It proved a disastrous adventure. By the time the Granma touched land, the planned diversionary rising in Santiago had been crushed. The guerrillas were ambushed and the remaining handful had to flee into the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.
Nevertheless, over the next two years, the guerrilla forces survived and strengthened, drawing support from the rural workers and peasants, and the growing unpopularity and disintegration of the Batista regime. Even the US realised that Batista’s days might be numbered. Lines of communication were kept open with the J26M – Frank Pais, leader of the movement in the cities, held regular meetings with the US consulate in Santiago when he wasn’t gun running to the mountains. As Castro’s position strengthened leading figures from the Ortodoxo party agreed a common alliance. Gott even quotes one CIA desk officer saying that during this period “my staff and I were all fidelistas” (p160)
Batista launched an all out offensive against the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra in 1958; it turned out to be a fatal mistake. Despite outnumbering the guerrillas, the dictator’s troops suffered heavy casualties in the mountain terrain – a thousand were killed or injured, 500 were captured or surrendered, their arms strengthening the guerrilla forces now numbering several thousand in total. Batista’s forces were now on the defensive, different guerrilla columns led by Guevara, Camillo Cienfuegos and Castro himself closed in on Havana and other major cities at Christmas 1958.
On New Year’s day 1959 Batista fled with his close entourage in a private plane. An attempt to put in place a transitional regime was broken by a general strike which paralysed the city for five days until Guevara and Cienfuegos’ columns marched in, followed days later by Castro.
That Batista’s government could be overthrown relatively easily by a guerrilla force was a testimony to the fact that the armed forces and bureaucracy were in an advanced state of distintegration by 1959 and the US government had effectively withdrawn its backing. The state was not smashed so much as it fell rotten ripe into the hands of the 26 July movement.
Wrong conclusions
The 1959 revolution had an enormous impact on Latin America and the world. Here was a hated dictatorship, that had been backed to the hilt by the USA which had been overthrown in a revolutionary fashion and in a country right in Washington’s backyard, dominated by its businesses.
Coming only 10 years after the Chinese revolution where a guerrilla, largely peasant army, under the leadership of the CCP had “surrounded the cities”, many political parallels were drawn and new theories of “peasant revolution” spun. Guevara was to contribute to this, developing the lessons of the successful Cuban revolution into a theory of the “guerrilla foco” which was to have disastrous effects for revolutionary strategy in Latin America and led to his own death in Bolivia in 1967.
It has also led to the tendency to write the working class out of the history of the Cuban revolution. The International Socialist Tendency (IST – SWP in Britain) do just this. Reacting to theories of peasant revolution. Tony Cliff developed the “theory” of deflected permanent revolution in the early 1960s, using the revolutions in China and Cuba to prove his point. The working classes in these countries he argued were weak and often “non revolutionary”. In theor absence, the place of the working class which in Trotsky’s theory would come to the head of the struggle of all classes, was filled by revolutionary intellectuals leading the peasantry.
Mike Gonzales, in his recent book Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, for example, does not even mention the Havana general strike and generally in his writing plays down the role of working class struggle in Cuba – because it does not fit the schema of “deflected permanent revolution”. Gott, too, tends to downplay the role of the working class in 1959, fascinated as he is with the Castroite movement. Yet in the revolution of 1959 (and of 1933) the working class in the cities did have an important role in the struggle against dictatorship. The problem was their leadership, with the CP/PSP placing a reformist and democratic noose around their heads.