In the final part of his review of Cuba: a New History by Richard Gott, Stuart King explains how Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement brought about a social revolution, but one where the working class was deprived of power
The 1959 government that followed the overthrow of Batista was not a socialist one. Castro had made an alliance with leading figures in the bourgeois Ortodoxo Party in July 1957 – the “Pact of the Sierra”. He followed this agreement to the letter. The government was dominated by irreproachable bourgeois figures. The presidency went to a respected judge Urrutia, the premiership to Cordona, Dean of the college of lawyers, the Foreign Ministry to Rufo Lopez, a manager of the Development Bank under former President Prio Socarras. The J26M took half of the ministries but leading figures like Castro held no positions in the government.
Yet this was no ordinary regime. Batista’s army and repressive state apparatus had been overthrown by the guerrilla army and the process of purges continued after the victory. Special tribunals dealt out summary justice to officers involved in the repressive dictatorship – several hundred were shot, thousands imprisoned and others summarily dismissed. Only the airforce escaped largely unscathed.
Real power lay with the guerrilla army and its commanders and everyone knew it. There was a “dual power” in Cuba, running through the government itself and through the J26M. The J26M was a loose coalition, stretching from Ché Guevara and Raul Castro on the left, to nationalists and anti-communists on the right. It had no democratic structures and only ever met once – in 1959.
The labour movement was also an arena of struggle. It was purged of its Batista leaders but the attempt of the Cuban Communist Party (PSP) to smoothly retake control was challenged by the more anti-communist elements of the J26M. The PSP were defeated in the new union leadership elections.
Indeed relations between the J26M and the PSP were extremely bad in the first half of 1959. In this period Castro was giving speeches, much of them directed to a US audience, making clear he was no communist, that the Cuban revolution was not red but “olive green”.
But it was not long before the government coalition itself started to unravel. The first to go was Cordona who discovered that despite being premier he had no power; he resigned to be replaced by Castro. But it was the proposed agrarian reform, or rather the US opposition to it, that was to blow apart the coalition in the summer of 1959.
The bulk of the guerrilla army had been drawn from the peasantry and landless labourers. Massive land inequality existed in Cuba. Huge estates lay underused while peasants scratched a living on inadequate plots. Land hunger sparked a wave of land occupations after the revolution and the government needed to respond.
As Richard Gott notes (page 171) the land reform proposed in May 1959 was a moderate one. Landowners were allowed to keep estates up to 1,000 acres, and “efficient” ones – cattle, sugar and rice plantations – were exempted. Landowners were to be compensated (apart from those with connections to the dictatorship) and the land distributed to the landless and small peasants in 67-acre plots. But it was not the content of the land reform that alarmed the US, but the context in which it was taking place; in the middle of a revolution it ran the risk of getting out of control.
The US responded ambiguously at first to the new Cuban government and to Castro. Sections of the government in Washington (and the CIA) thought he was a radical nationalist who could be tamed and used against the Communists. Others saw him as a dangerous revolutionary at the head of a communist infiltrated movement that threatened US interests.
By the summer of 1959 the US had decided to use the big stick. Gott quotes a National Security Council summary written in 1960 saying “In June (1959) we had reached the decision that it was not possible to reach our objectives with Castro in power…In July and August we had been busy drawing up a plan to replace Castro” (p180).
As a result the land reform, which included a clause stating land could only be owned in the future by Cubans – a clear threat to companies like United Fruit and Cuban American Sugar which owned huge estates in Cuba, was declared “unacceptable”.
Early summer saw a huge campaign against the reform in the US and Cuban press. The large cattle ranchers’ association led the campaign, donating $500,000 to bribe the press! The head of the airforce denounced the “indoctrination classes” being held in the army and then fled to Miami. Various ministers joined the attack with President Urrutia giving interviews about the communist threat to Cuba.
Days after a US diplomatic note opposing the reform and demanding prompt and effective compensation, Castro moved against the right in the government, which was now unreliable.
In June, several leading ministers were forced to resign and their posts filled by trusted J26M veterans (Raul Castro, for example was placed at the interior ministry). In July, Urrutia was forced to resign.
Purging the state
Castro’s refusal to bow to Washington’s demands set off a train of events not dissimilar to the attempts to remove Hugo Chavez from power in Venezuela in 2002-3. From the summer 1959 through 1960, plots were launched to overthrow Castro. Bombs were set off in the cities, economic sabotage ravaged the country and sections of the right wing of the J26M took to the hills to try and launch a guerrilla struggle, this time backed by the USA.
Castro immediately moved to consolidate his position. The armed forces, especially the airforce was purged again – some figures claim as much as 50 per cent of the personnel were sacked. Raul Castro was made Defence Minister, the army was renamed the Revolutionary Armed Forces and a large militia organised alongside it, initially comprising 100,000.
Gott documents the growing rift with the USA during this period, which had dire economic consequences for Cuba. Under a sugar quota agreement the USA took almost the entire Cuban sugar crop, the mainstay of the country’s economy. Much of the industrial infrastructure, the sugar mills for example, depended on US spare parts.
As relations with Washington deteriorated, the J26M government looked around to diversify its exports of sugar and for alternative imports – especially of oil. The Soviet Union was only too keen to step in, seeing in Castro not only a potential ally and link to Latin America, but also as a military outpost a mere 90 miles from the US coastline.
A wave of nationalisation of US assets took place in the summer of 1960. They were sparked off by the US pressurising oil refineries in Cuba – Standard Oil, Texaco, Shell – to refuse to accept Russian oil, which had arrived in exchange for sugar. The US replied by ending the sugar quota completely. The USSR agreed to buy the unsold 700,000 tons of the sugar harvest that year. By November 1960 the USA had imposed a crippling and complete trade embargo on Cuba – an embargo that exists to this day.
The turn to the left necessitated Castro to seek a renewed alliance and indeed fusion with the PSP, which probably had 18,000 members by this time. The right-wing J26M leaders of the trade unions were purged and replaced by reliable PSP apparatchiks. Moves were set in place to merge the J26M and the PSP into a single party. The Integrated Revolutionary Organisation was formed in July 1961, only becoming the Cuban Communist Party in 1965.
By the end of 1960, a Czech planning team had arrived to start re-organising the economy, and in 1961 a series of “organic laws” were introduced re-organising the government economic ministries. In the words of Edward Boorstein an American socialist working in the Cuban planning agency in 1960-63, “The purpose of this re-organisation was to complete the task of rebuilding the state apparatus, to give it the structure required to operate a socialist planned economy”.
What sort of revolution?
Richard Gott does not concern himself with how a guerrilla movement, led by a revolutionary nationalist, hostile to communism, ended up constructing a “socialist state” under the tutelage of the USSR. Yet for Marxists at the time (and since) this was a conundrum.
It was one thing to explain how Stalinist parties in Eastern Europe and China replicated, with the support and encouragement of the USSR, the bureaucratic overthrow of capitalism, while sidelining the working class. It was quite another to explain how a small group of revolutionary intellectuals with few links to Stalinism had led a predominately rural based guerrilla movement to destroy capitalism in Cuba.
For Tony Cliff of the British Socialist Workers Party, capitalism had not been overthrown just replaced by “state capitalism” and Cuba had become yet another small country dominated by “Soviet Imperialism”.
For most of the Fourth International it was taken as proof that even a “blunt instrument”, like a petit-bourgeois guerrilla movement, could be used to deliver socialism. Criticism of the Cuban revolution was reduced to “advice” to a revolutionary ally. The absence of workers’ democracy, of workers’ councils, political and press freedom were minor “bureaucratic deformations”.
Yet what came out of the bureaucratic overthrow of capitalism in Cuba was a Stalinist dictatorship – certainly one with more popular, anti imperialist roots than the Soviet Union and “Peoples Democracies” of Eastern Europe, and therefore not politically identical to them – but a dictatorship over the workers nevertheless. The Castroite movement transformed itself into a Stalinist party taking some of the worst features from that political current – its bureaucratism, fear of workers’ democracy, top down control, command economy etc.
The task of establishing a real socialist Cuba, where the workers direct the economy and state through their own democratic, workers’ councils, has still to be won. It will only be achieved through a new political revolution, one that will smash the Cuba’s Stalinist repressive apparatus and state.
The Castro regime was able to overthrow capitalism because it had already destroyed the bourgeoisie’s most important means of defence, its repressive apparatus, the army and police, in the 1959 revolution. As a result it was able to transform the state to run the post-capitalist property relations through a process of purgation and restructuring in the early 1960s.
Richard Gott’s book obviously covers more than the period covered by this review. It deals with the Cuban state’s foreign policy zigzags in Latin America and Africa pre and post Guevara’s death. It deals with the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the Cuban economy and the ongoing struggle against the US blockade – a struggle in which all socialists should stand fore square with the Cuban people and its government.
It also examines today’s Cuba, where the capitalist sectors of the economy are growing under the benign gaze of the longest serving dictator in the world – Fidel Castro – leader of the revolution and now perhaps its gravedigger. It is a book worth reading – critically – in order to understand the history of a remarkable revolutionary island.