Cuba in Revolution

A History Since the Fifties

Antoni Kapcia

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781861894489
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The recent retirement of Fidel Castro turned the world's attention toward the tiny but prominent island nation of Cuba and the question of what its future holds. Amid all of the talk and hypothesizing, it is worth taking a moment to consider how Cuba reached this point, which is what Antoni Kapcia provides with his incisive history of Cuba since 1959.
Cuba In Revolution takes the Cuban Revolution as its starting point, analyzing social change, its benefits and disadvantages, popular participation in the revolution, and the development of its ideology. Kapcia probes into Castro's rapid rise to national leader, exploring his politics of defense and dissent as well as his contentious relationship with the United States from the beginning of his reign. The book also considers the evolution of the revolution's international profile and Cuba's foreign relations over the years, investigating issues and events such as the Bay of Pigs crisis, Cuban relations with Communist nations like Russia and China, and the flight of asylum-seeking Cubans to Florida over the decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 catalyzed a severe economic and political crisis in Cuba, but Cuba was surprisingly resilient in the face of the catastrophe, Kapcia notes, and he examines the strategies adopted by Cuba over the last two decades in order to survive America's longstanding trade embargo.
A fascinating and much-needed examination of a country that has served as an important political symbol and diplomatic enigma for the twentieth century, Cuba In Revolution is a critical primer for all those interested in Cuba's past—or concerned with its future.

Chapter 1

Permanent Crisis: The Trajectory of the Revolution

Since the fifty-year history of the Cuban Revolution is being treated in this book through the analysis of a series of critical themes rather than in a straight chronology, it is appropriate to start with an introductory overview of the Revolution’s narrative, an account of the process’s whole trajectory within which the subsequent chapters can be read. However, even within this account there must be some structure, to prevent the presentation of fifty years of Cuban history as a series of unrelated and even conflicting events, when, in fact, there has been a logic (if not a deliberation) to that process of change. This is important to understand, as conventional historiography of the Revolution tends mostly to divide the five decades into a series of defined and usually agreed phases; most typically these are 1959–60/61, 1961–65/68, the mid-1960s–1970/71, the 1970s–1985 or so (or even to 1989), the 1990s and so on.¹ While this division can be an extremely useful teaching device and while it does serve a purpose in giving some sort of recognizable structure to an otherwise bewildering process, it broadly tends to be less helpful in creating a more analytical understanding of that process, because the periods usually tend to become unnecessarily rigid, creating an often inaccurate impression of a ‘zig-zag’ and uncontrolled trajectory.

In any account of the remarkable and still-surviving Revolution, therefore, the evidently dominant themes must be, firstly, the sheer fact of survival – despite repeated crises, US-backed invasion, almost five decades of US sanctions, and the disappearance of Cuba’s closest political and economic allies after 1991 – and, secondly, the currents of continuity which one can detect in an otherwise seemingly erratic and reactive process. The way to trace this trajectory here, therefore, is through a chronological account of the Revolution’s several major crises, each crisis being either an endogenously generated outcome of internal processes, developments or decisions – and thus telling us something about the internal tensions of the Revolution – or, alternatively, a result of exogenous pressures, whether political or economic – thereby telling us about the global context in which the Revolution has been obliged to exist and to which it has had to react.

Hence, by focusing on crises rather than phases, a different paradigm can be presented to enable our understanding, one which sees the process of change largely developing reactively (because Cuba has essentially always been a small underdeveloped economy and a lesser player in global power struggles) but also obeying certain underlying imperatives from within the revolutionary leadership and from the more activist sectors of the population. Seen through this prism, therefore, the process of transformation can best be understood as having passed through a series of cycles rather than phases, each cycle being defined by a repetitive process of crisis, debate, decision and certainty, until the next crisis; the point about a cycle rather than a phase, of course, is that it enables us to see the apparently contradictory pressures and patterns of the Revolution as in fact sequential and interrelated rather than as disconnected as the ‘phases paradigm’ would suggest.

Why, though, does the Revolution have this history of an underlying and apparently inherent tendency towards crisis? There are two sides to the answer. One might argue that crisis is, and must be, inherent in any process of revolutionary transformation; quite simply, a revolution that does not generate and pass through crisis is probably not revolutionizing the structures of the country in question. Every substantial change to a society (involving migration, sudden development, emancipation, and so on), to an economy (expropriating, distributing and so on) or to a political structure (empowering and disempowering, or mobilizing massively) necessarily creates an entirely new situation to which the population and leadership must react, but without experience of how to do so; if a process of revolution is deep and continuous, then the revolutionary leadership must always be in only limited control of that process. In addition one can expect that a tendency towards crisis is also likely in Cuba, as a small dependent sugar-reliant economy, whose struggle for economic survival has always essentially been determined by either the vagaries of an overcrowded market (since world sugar has increasingly tended towards overproduction) or, to resist that, by constructing a ‘special’ relationship with one reliable but dominant market. Moreover, when one adds the global context of the Cold War to this equation (within which of course the Revolution existed for its first three decades), or even the post-Cold War rearrangement, with a dominant and unchecked United States as the sole superpower, then one can see why Cuba was easily sucked into and buffeted by global political processes and tensions.

Why then have these crises been characterized by an essentially cyclical structure? This is largely because, when we examine each of the major crises in question, we can detect an inner process, in which each crisis (whatever the cause) has in turn tended to generate a subsequent, often extended, period of confusion and uncertainty at both leadership and population levels, which therefore has invariably involved a perceived need for a reassessment of ‘the Revolution’, addressing questions such as why the latest crisis emerged and how it might be resolved, and whether the causes are accidental or structural, serious or contingent. As such I have preferred to use the term ‘debate’ to explain and understand that process of reassessment. On a few occasions, this debate has been clear-cut and admitted; this was, as we shall see, very much the case in 1962–5 (the so-called ‘Great Debate’) or during the build-up to the post-1986 ‘Rectification’ or during the ‘dark days’ of the 1990s economic trauma. Mostly, however, the debate has been implicit and hidden, or a process of questioning rather than open discussion; often these debates have taken place behind closed doors (literally or metaphorically), either within the leading group or inside privileged academic circles, either therefore hidden or somewhat subdued. Hence, outsiders easily miss them, assuming that apparent silence means decision by decree and conformity. Nonetheless, the existence and role of these recurrent ‘debates’ have long constituted a key part of the Cuban process of change and adaptation, and (more importantly) a reflection of the internal dynamics of change and survival within the Revolution. Finally, in tracing the ‘cycle’, we can see that these ‘debates’ have mostly produced a period of more decisive certainty, often characterized either by a full, open and enthusiastic commitment to a given newly determined policy or stance or by a period of defensive unity against a seemingly hostile world. Invariably, of course, these new certainties have in turn been unable to survive the vicissitudes of internal change or external pressure, with the result that a new crisis has tended to emerge, thereby initiating a new version of the familiar cycle. Therefore, this analysis has selected five crises as the prism through which to assess the Revolution’s trajectory: those in 1961, 1962–3, 1970, 1980–85, and 1990–94.

The crisis in 1961 actually lasted several months, between January and June 1961. January generated it because that was when the United States and Cuba broke off diplomatic relations for the first time since 1902, while June can be seen to have ended it because of a seminal Castro speech on the revolution and culture. When the diplomatic break came on 3 January it was no real surprise, since the previous two years had seen an accelerating deterioration in the once close relationship. In January 1959 the Eisenhower Administration was unsure how to react to a revolution which, although clearly popular (even in the United States, thanks to favourable press reporting), was unfamiliar to US intelligence. Given US fears of Communism during the Cold War and in the still recent McCarthyite period, the major US concern about the young rebels was always any potential Communism in their ranks or intentions. Although there were no known Communists among the leaders, Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl had once belonged to the Cuban Communists’ Socialist Youth organization, leading to the assumption that he was likely still to harbour pro-Communist inclinations; and the Communists themselves (the PSP) had shifted in late 1958 from their earlier criticism of the rebels to offer an unconditional support which continued after 1959. Mostly, however, the rebels were seen as young, idealistic and non-Communist; indeed, some were critical of the PSP, especially for the party’s previous alliance with Batista (between 1939 and 1944) and for its quiescence after 1952. Certainly, three of the Revolution’s four main leaders – Fidel Castro, Guevara and Cienfuegos (who was killed in October 1959 in a plane crash) – were seen as unconnected to any Communist organizations or ideology.

However, uncertainty soon gave way to mistrust, as the initial anti-Batista unity began to crack, as the promised elections failed to materialize, as batistiano prisoners (supporters of Batista’s government) were tried in public sports stadiums, as the rebels’ pronouncements became visibly more radical, and as the more moderate government elements seemed to become more isolated. For a month, a unity cabinet ruled, composed largely of liberals and social democrats, with Fidel Castro officially on the sidelines, as head of the Rebel Army; however, since that was actually the country’s most powerful position, this was formalized in February 1959 when Castro became Prime Minister, replacing a liberal nominee, José Miró Cardona. Then in May 1959 came an all-encompassing agrarian reform, which, for all its relative moderation (compared to recent processes in Mexico or Bolivia), seemed to threaten later radicalization.² Certainly, this was the issue which most seriously divided opinion within the government and between Havana and Washington. In Havana, many of the government’s liberals and social democrats chose to resign, and the first president, the liberal Manuel Urrutia Lleó, also eventually resigned in July 1959 in protest at what he saw as creeping Communism; when he was replaced by Osvaldo Dorticós, who, like Raúl Castro, had once been a young Communist, this seemed to confirm those fears. In Washington, many US enterprises with Cuban interests, seeing the reform as the first step towards further nationalizations (as had happened in Iraq in 1951 and Egypt in 1952–5), pressured the US Administration to oppose it. At that point, the decision seems to have been taken in Washington to train a force of those Cubans who had fled into exile after January, to act against the rebels; this followed a template established in 1954, in Guatemala, when an alliance of US commercial interests and the CIA had created such an exile force to end President Arbenz’s reformist campaign of nationalization, land reform and unionization.

With the Cuban leadership aware of these plans, relations rapidly deteriorated. In February 1960, the government, seeking new sugar markets (driven by pragmatism and nationalism) and investment for its social and economic programmes, agreed with the Soviet Union to exchange some of Cuba’s sugar crop for Soviet oil. However, when the US-owned oil companies (under Washington’s pressure) refused to refine the oil, the Cuban government reacted by nationalizing their refineries, without compensation, provoking the US Administration to suspend Cuba’s annual sugar quota. What followed was a tit-for-tat process of escalation; as Havana expropriated more and more US businesses (all were nationalized by the end of October 1960) and some Cuban-owned enterprises, Washington imposed limited sanctions, banning US exports to Cuba (specifically penalizing the uncompensated expropriations), and the Soviet Union steadily increased its involvement, agreeing to buy any unsold Cuban sugar, and eventually signing a full-blown oil-for-sugar and investment agreement. Meanwhile, the Cuban émigré force continued to be trained and, in Cuba, neighbourhood Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) were formed among the citizenry from September 1960, in preparation for a seemingly inevitable invasion. As such the diplomatic break seemed predictable, but it also cut off vital sources of US intelligence, now forced to depend on unreliable defectors’ reports and wishful thinking among the émigrés. Hence, while US strategists confidently expected the invasion to generate a widespread anti-Castro uprising, when it actually took place – about 1,400 landing in the south on 17–19 April 1961 – it was an unmitigated disaster, with some eighty-nine invaders killed (though fewer than the Cuban losses of 157) but, more significantly, with 1,197 taken prisoner.³

This outcome was attributable to three factors. Firstly, the new US president, John F. Kennedy, who had inherited the invasion plans, withdrew US aerial support, exposing the invaders to air attack. Secondly, the well-primed Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, militias and CDR used their superior numbers and intelligence to round up potential collaborators. Thirdly, the Cuban population, rather than rallying behind the invasion, largely backed a revolution which, for all its faults, had considerably improved their lives. The whole episode was a turning point for both sides; in the United States, it is remembered as a defeat, the unheroic Bay of Pigs, while, in Cuba, it is the ‘heroic’ victory of Playa Girón (the actual beach). It demonstrated several things: that while the United States was actively opposed to the Revolution, its backing for military action was insufficient to halt the revolutionary process (gaining Cuba considerable Latin American support and sympathy), and that mobilization had been effective in radicalizing the population. It also allowed the rebel leaders to break irrevocably with any possibility of a liberal or social democratic definition of revolution and to progress in a more definably socialist direction; on 18 April, Castro defiantly declared the Revolution’s ‘socialist character’.

Meanwhile, 1961 had also seen a parallel process of argument and resolution in another area; in the cultural world, Cuban artists’ early unbridled enthusiasm, activity and hopes of better conditions arising from the still current Literacy Campaign had given way gradually to fears about the implications of the rising influence of the old PSP within the new cultural structures. When a film (PM), associated with the more liberal pole of the cultural elite, was criticized for its counter-revolutionary attitudes and then effectively banned, a heated debate began. To address this, the government organized a series of meetings with leading intellectuals, writers and artists, at the end of which Castro issued the Revolution’s first definition of cultural policy, the Palabras a los Intelectuales (Words to the Intellectuals), defining the parameters of cultural expression as ‘within the Revolution, everything [would be allowed], against the Revolution, nothing’; this proved accurate and meaningful in the long term but was interpreted then by many as being unclear and even ominous, generating a steady trickle of cultural emigrants, fearful of any impending Stalinism. By the end of 1961, therefore, a revolutionary process which had in 1959 seemed attractively broad and inclusive but vague in its ideology and direction now seemed much clearer in all senses. It had broken with the United States (and fifty years of tradition); it was closer to the Soviet Bloc and moving towards socialism; it had abandoned any possibility of liberal pluralism and a free-market economy; and through education, housing, equality and empowerment, it had transformed the lives of millions of Cubans. Moreover, it had done so – despite the real internal and external threats – through a process of often frenetic debate, within the revolutionary leadership and activist base, and within the intellectual community. The result was a more defiant and confident mood of certainty.

However, the pace of change and the underlying challenges (not least that political debate), now meant a rapid end to that certainty and a new period of crisis in several areas. The most significant crisis came in the Revolution’s political structures, where 1959–61 had seen the rapid redefinition of the revolutionary government, from a broad progressive alliance of revolutionaries, radicals and reformists towards socialism. The liberals’ departure from government had been echoed at the grass roots by a radicalization of the 26 July Movement, which had increasingly been subsumed by the Rebel Army, and its sequel, the Rev olution ary Armed Forces (FAR); this had led in October 1959 to the arrest of one protesting rebel commander, Huber Matos. It had also been paralleled by the increasing integration of the PSP into the Revolution’s structures; as the PSP leadership supported the process unconditionally, the availability of thousands of reliable Party members, willing to perform tasks at national and local levels, was a difficult gift to refuse. Hence, as the more diffuse strengths of the non-Communist rebels weakened, the more definably radical and better organized PSP activists replaced them.

This was all formalized by a new political structure; in 1961 a PSP leader, Aníbal Escalante, was entrusted with constructing a new umbrella organization for the three forces of the Revolution – the 26 July Movement, the PSP and the smaller DRE. This was the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI in Spanish) whose National Directo rate, unveiled in March 1962, consisted of ten PSP representatives to the 26 July’s thirteen and the DR’s one (plus Dorticós). Protests immediately came from those 26 July Movement members who were anyway suspicious of the PSP. When the PSP again ‘sinned’ on 13 March 1962, the die was cast: the Party’s offence was when one leader, Ravelo, conspicuously ignored Echevarría’s Catholicism during a ceremony to commemorate the DRE leader’s death in 1957. On 27 March Castro spoke out against his ‘sectarianism’ and the PSP advance within the new ORI was halted abruptly; Escalante was removed and dispatched to Eastern Europe. Since the leaders still needed a single unifying political structure, ORI was now to be replaced by a United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution (PURSC), confirming the now clearer shift towards socialism.⁴ The implications were far-reaching; while 1960–62 had seen a steady shift towards socialism and the Socialist Bloc, the Movement’s underlying heterodoxy meant an uneasy relationship with the new allies and the new orthodoxy. Moreover, other problems now aggravated those tensions. The first was the whole relationship with the USSR. After the victory of Playa Girón, the Cuban and Soviet leaders had agreed to take advantage of perceived US weakness to strengthen Cuba’s defences against any repetition. This time, however, defence meant not conventional weaponry (so successful in 1961) but the deterrent of Soviet nuclear weapons, stationed secretly until US aerial photographs in October 1962 revealed the existence of missile sites in central and western Cuba.

The outcome was, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis (Crisis del Caribe, to Cubans), which gripped the world for thirteen days while Moscow and Washington engaged in the Cold War’s hottest moment of brinkmanship. Once the Soviet leadership decided to stand down, using the pretext of the removal of US missiles from Turkey and also, in the secret protocol, of a US undertaking not to invade Cuba...