A History of the Cuban Revolution

Aviva Chomsky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118942284
• eBook ISBN: 9781118942291
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A fully-revised and updated new edition of a concise and insightful socio-historical analysis of the Cuban revolution, and the course it took over five and a half decades.

• Now available in a fully-revised second edition, including new material to add to the book's coverage of Cuba over the past decade under Raul Castro
• All of the existing chapters have been updated to reflect recent scholarship
• Balances social and historical insight into the revolution with economic and political analysis extending into the twenty-first century
• Juxtaposes U.S. and Cuban perspectives on the historical impact of the revolution, engaging and debunking the myths and preconceptions surrounding one of the most formative political events of the twentieth century
• Incorporates more student-friendly features such as a timeline and glossary

1
Cuba through 1959

Did the Cuban Revolution begin on January 1st, 1959, when the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the island, leaving a new revolutionary government to take power? Or did it begin on July 26th, 1953, when Fidel Castro’s guerrilla force attacked the Moncada Barracks in its first dramatic action? Or in the various revolutionary uprisings in 1844, 1868, 1895, 1912, or 1933, unfinished or aborted revolutions that failed to achieve their goals, but contributed to the island’s revolutionary identity?

Colonial History

Some Cuban accounts argue that the Cuban Revolution began in 1511 when the Taíno Indian Hatuey (who had fled to Cuba, pursued by the Spanish, from neighboring Hispaniola) took up arms against the Spanish colonizers. A statue of Hatuey in Baracoa, Cuba (Figure 1.1), proclaims him “the first rebel of America.”¹ Clearly the Cuban revolutionaries, and Cuban historiography, emphasize a long tradition of anti-colonial struggle on the island leading up to 1959.

Figure 1.1 Bust of Hatuey in the main plaza of Baracoa in eastern Cuba. “Hatuey: The First Rebel of America. Burned at the Stake in Yara, Baracoa.” Oriente Workers Lodge.

Source: Felix Hinz: “Baracoa. ‘Cortesillo’ y la ciudad española más antigua en Cuba” (2008), www.motecuhzoma.de/Baracoa-es.htm.

Estimates of Cuba’s indigenous population prior to 1492 range from a low of 100,000 to a high of 500,000. Within a few generations, a combination of military conquest, enslavement, and above all, diseases introduced by the Spanish, had virtually wiped out the natives as a distinct people. Nevertheless, both biologically and culturally, indigenous survivals shaped the society that emerged from the ruins. The Spanish adopted Taíno words for places, products, and phenomena that were new to them. (Some of these words, like hurricane, barbecue, and canoe, also made their way into English.) By choice or by force, indigenous women intermarried and reproduced with Spanish men. Indigenous foods and customs shaped the Spanish-dominated culture that emerged on the island.²

During much of the colonial period, the Spanish focused their attention on their mainland empires based in Mexico and Peru. The Caribbean was important strategically and geopolitically, because Spanish fleets carrying gold and silver from the mines on the mainland had to pass through there, and French, Dutch, and British pirates sought their share of the booty. These latter countries also succeeded in establishing control of some of the smaller islands, although the Spanish managed to hold on to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and half of Hispaniola. (The French took the eastern half, calling it Saint-Domingue, while the Spanish dubbed their half Santo Domingo.) Although Cuba was the largest island in the Caribbean, its population was small: in 1700, only 50,000 people lived there.³

The British, French, Dutch and Danish, lacking the source of riches the Spanish had found in the mainland, set about establishing sugar plantations on their islands. The Portuguese did the same in Brazil. Together they imported millions of slaves between the mid-1600s and the early 1800s. Brazil, Saint-Domingue, Jamaica and Barbados in particular became huge exporters of sugar. The Spanish islands, though, were imperial backwaters until the late 1700s, with smaller populations, and more diversified and subsistence production.

The big influx of enslaved Africans into Cuba, and the sugar export economy, started towards the end of the 1700s, as the Spanish attempted to increase their empire’s economic efficiency through a series of measures known as the Bourbon Reforms. Meanwhile the American and French Revolutions, followed by the Haitian Revolution, dramatically altered the global economy. The world’s largest sugar producer, Saint-Domingue (which restored its Taíno name, Haiti, after the slave rebellion that freed it from France), retreated entirely from global markets, and soon Spain’s mainland colonies followed the United States and Haiti in fighting for and eventually achieving independence. In the nineteenth century Spain turned its full attention to its much-reduced Caribbean empire, with Cuba as its centerpiece.

Over a million Africans were brought to the island in less than a century. Enslaved Africans continued to pour into Cuba until 1866, and slavery itself was not abolished until 1886. Between 1790 and 1867, 780,000 arrived.⁴ A substantial proportion of today’s population of Cuba is at least partly descended from these Africans: estimates range from 30 percent to 60 percent.

Others arrived in Cuba also. As British pressure to end the slave trade increased, Cuban planters turned to China, and in the middle of the nineteenth century some 100,000 Chinese were imported to work in conditions not far removed from slavery. Large numbers of Spaniards continued to arrive both before and after Cuba gained its independence in 1898. U.S. investors, including both individual planters and well-known companies like Hershey and the United Fruit Company, began to take over the production of sugar in the late nineteenth century. In the early years of the twentieth century, the United States orchestrated a large influx of migrant workers from U.S.-occupied Haiti to labor on the plantations. Sugar workers also migrated from the British Caribbean. Refugees came from Europe, including Jews fleeing the Nazis and Spanish Republicans escaping the 1936–39 Civil War and subsequent Franco dictatorship.

In an influential body of work in the 1940s, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz argued that Cuba’s population was characterized by the phenomenon of transculturation. Each successive group of migrants, he explained, was “torn from his native moorings, faced with the problem of disadjustment and readjustment, of deculturation and acculturation.” Cuba’s history, “more than that of any other country of America, is an intense, complex, unbroken process of transculturation of human groups, all in a state of transition.”⁵

The United States may seem to share Cuba’s multiracial, transculturated character, and in many ways it does. There are, though, some major historical differences. Africans formed a far greater proportion of Cuba’s population, and they continued to arrive in large numbers during most of the nineteenth century. This presence meant that African languages, religions, and cultures remained much more alive in twentieth-century Cuba than in the United States.

In the United States, the independence movement was carried out by whites – many of them slaveholders – and the nation established in 1776 committed itself to maintaining the slave system. Not until almost a hundred years later were blacks granted citizenship. Even then, the country’s white leadership was committed to a policy of territorial expansion and racial exclusion.

In Cuba, colonial rule lasted over a century longer, and slavery was understood as a part of the colonial system, firmly rejected by many leaders of the independence movement. “To be Cuban comes before being white, before being black, before being mulatto,” white independence leader José Martí announced in an oft-repeated phrase. Independence would create a country “with all, and for the good of all.”⁶

The Cuban War of Independence began in 1868 when plantation owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes issued the “Grito de Yara,” freed his slaves, and called upon them to join him in fighting for Cuba’s independence. He was soon joined by Antonio Maceo, the “Bronze Titan” – the mixed-race son of a Venezuelan farmer and a free Afro-Cuban woman, Mariana Grajales. Together with José Martí these three formed the pantheon of Cuban independence leaders, highlighting for future generations the diversity that the movement represented. The Mayor of Havana officially named Grajales as “the mother of Cuba” in 1957. Each of these heroes of independence today has a Cuban airport bearing his or her name: Cuba’s main international airport in Havana is named after José Martí (as are its National Library and other important institutions), while the airports in Santiago, and Guantánamo and Bayamo are named, respectively, after Maceo, Grajales, and de Céspedes.

National independence, then, and national identity, were associated with ideas of racial equality and racial unity in Cuba in a way very different from in the United States. This does not mean, of course, that anti-black racism did not, and does not still, exist in Cuba. No society whose history is based on centuries of racially based exploitation can free itself overnight from the structures and ideas built into this kind of system. Even within the independence movement some, like Céspedes, argued for a gradual abolition that would accommodate the interests of the sugar plantocracy. Still, the relationship of anti-black racism to nationalism, and the relationships of blacks to the independence movement and ideology, were very different in Cuba from in the United States. After 1902, nationalist ideas about the integral connection between foreign, colonial domination and racial inequality only strengthened.

The experience and meaning of independence in Cuba were also shaped by the role of the United States in the process. Cuba fought for and obtained independence in a continent that was increasingly dominated by its northern neighbor. Martí echoed the sentiment of Simón Bolívar, leader of the Latin American independence movements three-quarters of a century earlier, who famously stated that “The United States … seem[s] destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of freedom.”⁷ In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine announced U.S. intentions to police the hemisphere (for its own good, of course). The United States extended its control westward, challenging newly independent Mexico and climaxing in a war that added over half of Mexico’s territory to the United States in 1848. In 1891, Martí penned the similarly oft-quoted essay “Our America” in which he warned of the U.S. threat. He used the phrase “Our America” to refer to Latin America, which he contrasted to the other America – the United States.

“Our America is running another risk that does not come from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interest between the two halves of the continent … The scorn of our formidable neighbor, who does not know us, is Our America’s greatest danger … Through ignorance it may even come to lay hands on us …” To challenge the threat of U.S. domination, Martí argued, Latin America must embrace its non-European origins – the very origins that the United States rejected. Latin America must “make common cause with the oppressed, in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors” and, in particular, reject the “wicked and unpolitical disdain for the aboriginal race” that characterized the United States, which “drowns its Indians in blood.”⁸

Nevertheless, Cuban attitudes towards the United States were decidedly mixed. Significant numbers, especially of white Cubans, saw the United States as a beacon of freedom and progress, and believed that Cuba’s best hope for the future lay in becoming a part of the nation to the north. While Cuba’s historians have tended to downplay or demonize annexationists (just as U.S. historians have de-emphasized the many Americans who supported the British rather than the independence movement at the end of the eighteenth century), they constituted an important voice both before and after independence. Czech scholar Josef Opatrný argued t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Cuba through 1959
• 2 Experiments with Socialism
• 3 Relations with the United States
• 4 Emigration and Internationalism
• 5 Art, Culture, and Revolution
• 6 Cuba Diversa
• 7 The “Special Period”
• 8 Cuba into the Twenty-First Century
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement