Visions of Power in Cuba

Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971

Lillian Guerra

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781469618869, 9780807835630
• eBook ISBN: 9780807837368
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba’s six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice.
Mass rallies and labor mobilizations of unprecedented scale produced tangible evidence of what Fidel Castro called “unanimous support” for a revolution whose “moral power” defied U.S. control. Yet participation in state-orchestrated spectacles quickly became a requirement for political inclusion in a new Cuba that policed most forms of dissent. Devoted revolutionaries who resisted disastrous economic policies, exposed post-1959 racism, and challenged gender norms set by Cuba’s one-party state increasingly found themselves marginalized, silenced, or jailed. Using previously unexplored sources, Guerra focuses on the lived experiences of citizens, including peasants, intellectuals, former prostitutes, black activists, and filmmakers, as they struggled to author their own scripts of revolution by resisting repression, defying state-imposed boundaries, and working for anti-imperial redemption in a truly free Cuba.

Chapter 1 THE OLIVE GREEN REVOLUTION

Media, Mass Rallies, Agrarian Reform, and the Birth of the Fidelista State

No one fears that we should transform ourselves into dictators. Only he who does not have the support of the people becomes a dictator.

Fidel Castro at Camp Columbia, Havana, in Noticias de Hoy, 9 January 1959

If there is one image most associated with the first years of the Cuban Revolution, it is that of a larger-than-life, impassioned Fidel Castro leaning forward to address a pulsing sea of a million or more exuberant Cubans. A quintessential hallmark of the Revolution since 1959, mass rallies of immense proportions quickly became historical “facts,” that is, visual testaments of Cubans’ near-unanimous consent to Fidel’s vision and style of rule rather than fastidiously constructed “truths” that Fidel and his closest allies initially worked hard to achieve. The impact of rallies and their evolving character during the first six months of the Revolution remains as unexplored by scholars as the shift in their nature and purpose afterward.¹

Undoubtedly, the mass rallies of the early days of January 1959 were spontaneous expressions of a collective desire for change. Even when they became commonplace events occurring as many as three or four times a month in virtually every province, they remained forums that generated debate, scandal and, at times, open conflict among important actors in the 26th of July Movement and political rivals for power, including Cuba’s historic Communist Party known as the PSP. However, by July 1959, the tenor and function of rallies had forever changed. Between January and July, the mass rally acquired long-lasting meaning and a clear political purpose: it became the founding anchor of the Revolution’s grand narrative of redemption. Marking the anniversary of the founding of Fidel Castro’s movement in 1953, the mass rally held on 26 July 1959 represented the first formal “call to associate oneself with Fidel and through him with the [many] miracle[s]” that had preceded his rise to power, Batista’s fall, and the victories to come.² Called La Gran Concentración Campesina, this rally brought together half a million peasants from the remotest areas of the island and more than a million habaneros, sophisticated urbanites of all social classes. On a symbolic level, it did more than simply capture the imagination of Cubans, inspiring them to feel more united than ever before. Coming on the heels of six months of struggle over the ideological direction of the Revolution and the nature of the state, the Concentración Campesina made Fidel Castro the primary protagonist in an unfolding drama of national redemption as well as a self-appointed prophet empowered to define the process of change. Consequently, participation in such rallies would come to represent both the evidence of the 26th of July Movement’s unparalleled popular legitimacy and the means for generating such evidence in the national and international arena.

As we shall see, Fidel himself authored a foundational aspect of the Revolution’s grand narrative when he declared the million-person mass rally a form of “direct democracy” comparable to that of ancient Greece. In doing so, he not only made unity behind his vision a basic requirement of being a revolutionary but also participation in rallies—rather than other forms of assembly—the quintessential proof and the vehicle for achieving unity.³ One year later, Fidel made the equivalency official when a million citizens signed a nationalist manifesto known as the First Declaration of Havana. Standing before the national monument to José Martí built by Batista, Fidel addressed the crowd as “The General National Assembly of the People.”⁴ However, the substitution of mass rallies for electoral process and legislative bodies achieved overwhelming support in 1959. How this happened is the principal question that concerns us here. Answering it reveals a complex story of unfolding national unity amid tremendous international pressures and historic social divisions.

When Batista staged his escape from Cuba during New Year’s celebrations in 1959, he left behind a society deeply atomized by state terror and the violent tactics of an opposition dominated by the 26th of July. Batista also left great political fragmentation in his wake: effective strategies of censorship and clientelism that muted the voices of organized labor as well as those of many black Cubans from the middle and working classes who belonged to associations and clubs that had benefited from Batista’s largesse. Thus, even as euphoric Cubans gleefully received rebel forces on the streets of the capital, the triumph of revolutionary forces caught many Cubans by surprise.⁵ Consequently, the creation of a revolutionary state did not engender a united front of support overnight. Critical points of friction included race, racism, the autonomy of organized labor, the role of middle-class civic activists, and splits within the 26th of July Movement over the revolutionary government’s decision to legalize the PSP and admit its militants into the national political fold.

By the time the Concentración Campesina took place on 26 July 1959, Fidel and a small handful of guerrilla commanders had overcome these potentially explosive divisions to convert support for their leadership into an unprecedented spectacle and an observable reality of apparently unconditional unity. To do this, they relied on a discourse of radical morality that denied any role to politics or ideology in carrying out the historic goals of consolidating national sovereignty, cleaning up corruption, and promulgating a long-awaited agrarian reform.

By creating a common history of struggle against Batista that elided rivalries among the armed opposition and diminished popular complicity, the media became a critical factor in consolidating the legitimacy of Fidel’s leadership and the 26th of July Movement’s historic authenticity. Belief in the unique morality of Fidel’s vision of “humanism” inspired most Cubans to grant him ever greater shares of control over the state and the political arena without concern that doing so implied an erosion of their own freedom. Humanism would bring about the moral uplift of all, redeeming peasants from misery and government neglect, while also absolving affluent, repentant Cubans from the sins of class complacency under Batista’s rule. At the same time, U.S. criticisms of early policies as an incipient form of Communism coincided with important maneuvering on the part of Cuba’s Communists. However, the combination of U.S. attacks and a series of standoffs between the PSP and 26th of July leaders ultimately benefited the grand narrative of redemption being elaborated by Fidel and, by extension, the popular base of his authority.

“FROM THE SHADOWS INTO THE LIGHT”

Liberating the Media, Crafting a Common History of Struggle against Batista

By any measure, life in Cuba during last two years of the Batista regime can be characterized as controlled chaos. In addition to suffering economic recession, massive graft at all levels of government, and the takeover of the most profitable sectors of the tourist trade by the U.S. mafia, Cubans contended with a political context of violence that they did not fully comprehend until January 1959. Behind years of fragmented reporting and contradictory accounts was a full-fledged, much bloodier civil war than most had realized. News of rebel tactics, government repression, and dire predictions peppered the confidential daily dispatches of U.S. embassy officials to their superiors in Washington. Yet strict censorship, the bribing of journalists, and Batista’s reliance on professional publicity agents and staged “prisoner parades” at press conferences prevented knowledge of the extent of the opposition and the atrocities committed by Batista’s henchmen from reaching most of the Cuban public.⁶ Moreover, Batista confused the goals of his armed opponents: first, he accused them of being “bandits” and “terrorists” who wanted to destroy the economy and provoke a U.S. military intervention; then he accused them of being Communists who wanted to turn Cuba into a Soviet satellite.⁷ Both charges sought to exploit the deep well of anti-imperialism that lay at the heart of mainstream politics. Until 1958 at least, they seemed to work.

Because of the political influence that the Cuban media peddled prior to Batista’s 1952 coup, Cuban politicians had often referred to the press as the “fourth power,” after the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government. For Batista, though, the press functioned as an extension of his rule. Demonstrating this, only six newspapers out of a total of over sixty on the island made ends meet through subscriptions and advertising: The rest relied on political handouts from local officials or direct payments from the dictator. Batista paid $217,300 a month to newspapers and magazines as well as $22,000 a month to individual journalists. By December 1958, recipients of what Batista called his “attention” had come to include the most prestigious papers in Cuba such as Diario de la Marina, El Mundo, El Comercio, El País, Avance, the magazine of political parody Zig-Zag, and even Prensa Libre, a paper often critical of Batista and owned by Sergio Carbó, a former cabinet minister of the 1933 revolutionary government that Batista had overthrown.⁸ Since the international press could not be bought with payoffs, Batista’s censors resorted to cutting out whole articles that appeared in English-language newspapers, a method that left telltale holes in U.S. newspapers when they were distributed across the island.⁹ Thus, in the early months of 1959, many Cubans agreed that the greatest problem facing the “new Cuba” was the problem of corrupt journalism; more than any other factor, it had facilitated Batista’s rule.¹⁰ If there was much Cubans did not know about Batista’s methods, the history of divergent positions and the experiences of his armed opponents was equally illusory.

Judging from their actions upon taking power, the Sierra experience endowed 26th of July guerrillas with the sense that they already had the authority to govern and deserved a monopoly on power. By enacting policy among the peasantry of the liberated zone, they had already begun to overturn the legacy of Batista’s rule and were founding a new society in their midst. Confidence in their own historic exceptionality and personal heroism helps explain why Fidel refused to negotiate power with any other movement and publicly dismissed other rebel groups in his first national address at Camp Columbia on 8 January 1959.

In this speech, Fidel credited only his movement with consolidating the victory and defended the right of his officers to control the state’s armed forces, from the army to the police.¹¹ He also characterized the motives of independent groups outside his control as “divisionist” and called armed activists like the student-led Directorio Revolucionario (DR) and the Segundo Frente del Escambray who had taken important military outposts and government buildings before his own forces could do so “unjustified scoundrels.” Famously he challenged, “¿Armas para qué? ¿Para combatir a quién? [Weapons...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Visions of Power in Cuba
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction “TODAY, EVEN FIDEL IS A COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY!”
• Chapter 1 THE OLIVE GREEN REVOLUTION
• Chapter 2 GOOD CUBANS, BAD CUBANS, AND THE TRAPPINGS OF REVOLUTIONARY FAITH
• Chapter 3 WAR OF WORDS
• Chapter 4 TURNING THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN
• Chapter 5 RESISTANCE, REPRESSION, AND CO-OPTATION AMONG THE REVOLUTION’S CHOSEN PEOPLE
• Chapter 6 CLASS WAR AND COMPLICITY IN A GRASSROOTS DICTATORSHIP
• Chapter 7 JUVENTUD REBELDE
• Chapter 8 SELF-STYLED REVOLUTIONARIES
• Chapter 9 THE OFENSIVA REVOLUCIONARIA AND THE ZAFRA DE LOS DIEZ MILLONES
• Chapter 10 THE REEL, REAL, AND HYPER-REAL REVOLUTION
• Epilogue THE REVOLUTION THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN AND THE REVOLUTION THAT WAS
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series