Prologue to the Cuban Revolution pt. I

This piece by Robin Blackburn was originally published in the New Left Review in October 1963. Part one of four is below.

The Cuban Revolution is now widely recognized as an event of world-historical importance. For the first time there has been a socialist revolution in the Americas. For the first time the new forms of colonialism have been unequivocally rejected. For the first time a socialist revolution has been carried through without the leadership of a Communist Party. For the first time one of the non-aligned nations has joined the Communist world. For the first time a socialist revolution has occurred in a relatively developed country. For the first time capitalism has been confronted with a major revolution realized in conditions of world peace, rather than out of a context of general war. The universal significance of the Cuban revolution makes it one of the decisive phenomena of our time. Yet this significance can only be properly understood after an exact characterization of its particular nature. And this has been almost completely absent from the great volume of debate which the revolution has given rise to outside Cuba. 

To take only one example: the first phase of the Revolution —the overthrow of Batista—has been widely described as “bourgeois” or “middle-class”. Dogmatic Marxism is curiously joined by North American liberalism in this belief.[1] Yet between January 1959 and November 1960 the corporate wealth of the Cuban bourgeoisie was expropriated with little or no compensation and their political power was swiftly and completely annulled. Throughout that period, indeed up to the time of writing, there was no organized internal opposition to the Revolution on any serious scale whatever. Counter-revolution had to be manufactured from abroad, by a foreign power. How is one to explain the fact that the Cuban bourgeoisie, which is so often credited with having overthrown Batista, proved so impotent in the eighteen months that followed his fall? It was a bourgeoisie that was at least as large and prosperous as in other semi-developed countries of Latin America. The conglomeration of well over 200,000 refugees in Miami provides ample evidence that neither the bourgeoisie itself nor any significant part of its subaltern strata had suddenly acquired a taste for social revolution. Why did the presence of this wealthy and apparently well-entrenched class provide no sociological base for counter-revolution inside Cuba?

Crucial questions like this can only be answered by an analysis which situates the Revolution within its specific historical context. The study which follows attempts to offer a provisional model of the social structure of pre-revolutionary Cuba, and by doing so, to provide a key to an understanding of the nature and development of the Revolution. Its conclusions must be, to some extent, tentative. Critical aspects of Cuba’s past remain almost undocumented; interpretation of key periods has been rudimentary. The recent torrent of books on Cuba has, with some notable exceptions, not created much greater illumination. Nearly all of these adopt either a parochially North-Americo-centric viewpoint, which reduced Cuban history simply to its relations with the United States, or a popular-biographical approach, which absorbs the development of the Revolution in the personal trajectory of its leader.[2] In either case, the autonomy and creativity of the Revolution is diminished, and the real history of Cuba concealed.

Like other great revolutions, Cuba’s is a proclamation that man can make his own history. But this history can only be made within certain material and social conditions. This essay will study these. At this stage, any attempt will inevitably suffer from many limitations and failings. But with this reservation, a historical and theoretical analysis is possible. This essay will, it is hoped, contribute towards one.

1. The Eclipse of the Landed Aristocracy

Cuba is strikingly and immediately set apart from the rest of Latin America by its late independence. The whole of the Spanish American mainland was liberated by 1825. In Cuba, Spanish rule lasted a full 73 years longer, till 1898. The first and decisive question posed by the island’s history is why Cuba, alone of all the Spanish colonies in the Americas, failed to gain its independence early in the nineteenth century? Any study of Cuban society in our own time must take as its starting point this problem.

Cuba was discovered by Columbus in 1492. The first Spanish foothold in the Americas was, however, for nearly three centuries one of the least developed. The Indian population of Cuba, the peaceful and primitive Caribs, were virtually wiped out by repression and disease within the first two decades of colonization, leaving a severe labour shortage in the island. The discovery of gold and silver on the Latin American mainland led to prolonged neglect of the immense potentialities of Cuban agriculture. The initial phase of Spanish colonization in the Americas was overwhelmingly military and mineral-oriented: it began as a booty imperialism, sacking and plundering the specie of Mexico and Peru, and only gradually broadened and diversified its character subsequently. The lack of either men or minerals to exploit in Cuba relegated the colony to a minor, mainly military and administrative, role in the Spanish imperial system. Between 1720 and 1762, the economy of the island was still so undeveloped that its entire European trade was carried by an average of only five or six merchant ships each year.

The stagnation and neglect of the colony were thrown into dramatic relief by the immense changes wrought almost overnight by the British occupation of Cuba in 1762, in the course of the Seven Years’ War. In the nine months of British military rule, nearly 100 trading ships called at Havana, and 10,000 African slaves were imported into the island.[3] The take-off point of the plantation economy can be dated from this brief but overpowering intervention. Sugar and coffee production began to expand rapidly, assisted by the international conjuncture. During the U.S. War of Independence (1775–83), Spanish restrictions on Cuban trade were relaxed in favour of Spain’s new allies, France and the United States. Then in the 1790’s, the Haitian revolution eliminated the single largest producer of sugar and coffee from the world market. The character of the Spanish colony in Cuba was transformed as population and production swiftly rose in response to these developments.

It is in large part this special history which explains the unique failure of Cuba to win independence in the nineteenth century. Cuba’s physical isolation from the mainland was, of course, critically important in the success of the Spaniards in maintaining their hold of the island; the purely geographical factor which now impedes U.S. attempts to export counter-revolution blocked the spread of revolution to Cuba in the early nineteenth century. However, if it was the logistic situation which prevented the kind of military liberation which the Venezuelan armies effected in, say, Bolivia, this does not explain why there was no profound internal upheaval in Cuba for more than fifty years after the Declaration of Venezuelan Independence. The fundamental cause of this paralysis lay not in the geographical position, but in the socio-economic structure of Cuba. The white population was outnumbered by the black: 291,021 to 339,959 by the census of 1817.[4] By comparison, only 2 per cent of the population of mainland Spanish America was African in origin at this date; there were fewer negroes in all the mainland colonies of Spain put together than in Cuba.[5] At the same time, because of the very belated and rapid rise in population in the late eighteenth century, the majority of the white population of Cuba itself must have been Spanish-born peninsulares. This made Cuba a further exception among Spanish American colonies. Finally, by 1817, a significant proportion of the remaining whites were either French refugees from Haiti (30,000) or Spanish royalist refugees from the mainland colonies (20.000).[6]

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The Spanish-American revolutions of the nineteenth century were made by the white land-owning class born in the colonies. The slogans of the struggle were those of U.S. Independence and the French Revolution, but the revolutionaries were in no sense bourgeois. In revolt against the anachronistic mercantilism and centralizing bureaucracy of the Spanish Empire, the insurgent latifundists had no motive nor desire to change the internal social relations of the colonies. A decade of continuous war and anarchy failed to radicalize the struggle for Latin American independence (in Mexico, the one country where the initial uprising had a genuine social content, it delivered the revolution into the hands of extreme Creole reaction). Despite the classic twentieth century conditions for social upheaval, the landowners of Gran Colombia emerged unchallenged from the struggle.

The balance of social forces was utterly different in Cuba. Any revolt by the Creole landowners against Spain risked snowballing into a racial and social avalanche which would have buried them. The conflagration in Haiti was close and memorable. Small negro revolts and conspiracies had already occurred in Cuba in 1792 and 1793; larger uprisings erupted in 1795 and 1814.[7] Thus when the ravolutionary junta of Caracas invited Cuba to join the Republic of Gran Colombia in 1810, a mass meeting at Havana, composed mainly of poor whites, welcomed the call. But, despite the fact that the King of Spain was in exile, the Junta Superior of Cuba, representing the large plantation-owners and merchants, rejected the invitation and reaffirmed its loyalty to the Spanish Crown. The threat of a cataclysmic slave revolt paralyzed the cause of independence among a white minority who were in any case less susceptible to it than their equivalents on the mainland. The Cuban landowners were shackled by their own oppression. The Spaniards saw this clearly enough. The Spanish Minister, Calatrava, wrote in 1823: “The fear that the Cubans have of the negroes is the most secure means which Spain has to guarantee her domination over this island.”[8]

The failure of the Cuban landowners to liberate Cuba early in the nineteenth century condemned them, fifty years later, to a harsher struggle against Spain than had been witnessed anywhere else in Latin America.

The island’s first “Declaration of Independence” was proclaimed in Yara, in Oriente Province, in 1868. Its authors were predominantly the coffee planters of Eastern Cuba. The coffee crop had grown rapidly from the end of the eighteenth century onwards: exports, which were three million pounds in 1795, had risen to 64 million pounds in 1833. The main market for the crop was the United States. By the 1840’s the U.S.A., reacting against Spain’s traditional protectionist trade policy, in reprisal raised its tariff barriers against Cuban coffee. Exports plummeted to five million pounds by 1850 and to zero by 1860.[9] The infuriated coffee planters were joined by other more traditional sections of the landowning class, particularly the ranchers of Central Cuba, who were threatened by the expansion of the sugar industry. The sugar planters, unaffected by U.S. reprisals against Spain’s mercantilism, remained loyal to Madrid. Significantly, moreover, none of the landowners who drafted the Declaration of Yara were large slave-owners, and most of them owned no slaves at all.[10]

A murderously destructive war followed the revolt. For ten years, from 1868 to 1878, Central and Eastern Cuba was an overrun and devastated battleground in which 81,098 Spanish soldiers lost their lives.[11] The protracted length and heavy losses of the war inflicted lethal damage on the landowning elite. The class which had initiated the war was progressively exhausted by it. As the struggle wore on, the military leadership of the struggle passed from aristocratic landowners like Cespedes and Agramonte to plebians like Gomez, a former corporal in the Spanish Army, and Maceo, son of a slave. The Convention of El Zanjon, which was signed in 1878, merely gave a respite during which both sides prepared for the decisive struggle. Between 1881 and 1886 Spain finally emancipated the slaves of Cuba.

In 1895, U.S. trade reprisals against Spain were extended to sugar. The value of Cuban sugar exports fell by one-third: the price per ton, 3.52 dollars in 1893, dropped to 2.02 dollars in 1895.[12] The sugar planters of Western and Central Cuba were now directly affected by the claustrophobic character of the colonial regime, and for the first time gave tacit support to the independence movement, which was now led by Jose Mati, son of a minor Spanish official. War erupted in the same year. The Second Independence War, although much shorter than the First—it was terminated by the U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1898—was still more destructive. Spain poured 218,000 men into the island, whose total population at this time was only 1,570,000. The Spanish armies in the Independence Wars of mainland Latin America had numbered only half as many.[13] Faced with the bitter resistance of the population to colonial rule, the Spanish High Command imposed a curfew on the whole island, and introduced to history the concentration camp: the entire rural population of the insurgent areas was driven into vast campos de reconcentracion and exterminated there by disease and starvation. Historians usually estimate that between 250,000 and 350,000 people had died by the end of the war.[14]

The wars for independence in Cuba were clearly qualitatively distinct from the Latin American revolts of the early nineteenth century. On the threshold of the twentieth century, the campaigns in Cuba prefigured the pitiless, total wars of decolonization of this century. Weyler’s repression in Cuba can only be compared to the colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam: the lineage of the Spanish campos de reconcentracion in Cuba to the French regroupements in Algeria and the American “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam is direct. Cuba’s whole social order was shattered. The landowning aristocracy was decimated and demoralized. It had missed its chance: nerveless before one revolution, blasted by another, it had been ground between its fear of its African slaves and the vengeance of its Spanish overlords.

Its last possibility of assuming the domination of independent Cuba was destroyed by the evolution of the sugar industry. The late nineteenth century had seen the rationalization of Cuban sugar cultivation and the emergence of a colonosystem[15]: production rose from 223,000 tons in 1850 to over 1,000,000 tons in 1894, while the number of mills was reduced from 2,000 to 207. The sugar latifundists, mainly located in Matanzas and Las Villas provinces, survived the Wars of Independence more successfully than any other section of the landowning class. They were the most coherent and stable power group for the first two decades of the Republic established in 1902. Although almost each election brought U.S. military intervention or even outright military administration (1906–1909), the consolidation of a landowning oligarchy of the classic Latin American type still seemed possible. The catastrophic sugar slump that followed the First Word War delivered the coup de grace to this hope. The value of the crop fell from 1,022 million dollars in 1920 to 292 million dollars in 1921 and 56 milion dollars in 1932.[16] As prices collapsed, the plantations changed hands with accelerating speed. By 1925–26, the sugar-mill companies owned outright 170,873 caballerias of sugar land, or over 80 per cent of the total. The foreign-owned companies survived the slump much more successfully than the Cuban companies, and by 1929 were milling over 78 per cent of the cane. One-quarter of the cane-land was owned by four United States companies alone—Cuban American Sugar, Cuba Cane Sugar, General Sugar and United Fruit.[17] Total U.S. investment in Cuba rose from 220 million dollars in 1913 to 1,525 million in 1929, and from 17.7 per cent of all U.S. investments in Latin America to 27.3 per cent.[18] The per capita value of the U.S. stake in the Cuban economy was thus seven times as great as for the continent as a whole. It had reached dimensions where it no longer supported and secured the local landowning class, as it did everywhere else in Latin America: it had largely replaced this class.

After the hammer-blows of the Wars against Spain and the invasion of U.S. capital in the wake of the slump, the system of Cuban land tenure could not support even the vestige of a traditional landowning elite. The cane census of 1931 revealed that only 8.1 per cent of the total sugar cane was cultivated by free colonos[19]; and the average holding of these was a mere 15 acres of cane land. The sugar sector was, moreover, a more significant index of the total land situation in Cuba than any other export sector in Latin America: 55 per cent of Cuba’s cultivable land is devoted to cane, compared with, for example, 15 per cent of the cultivable area devoted to bananas in Ecuador, the world’s largest banana republic (20 per cent of world imports). The slump in primary producing prices had a similar effect in the tobacco sector, traditionally the stronghold of small cultivators in Cuba. The value of tobacco exports fell from 39.0 million dollars in 1929 to 12.9 million dollars in 1932[20], and eight years later the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz noted: “Capitalism has been getting control of the vegas (tobacco farms). In the last fifteen years, the number of landowning tobacco growers has dropped from 11,000 to some 3,000 . . . the guajiro is joining the ranks of the proletariat.”[21] Micro-studies of Cuban landownership confirm this picture. Alejandro Fernandez de Cueto, in a study of the Cienfuegos-Trinidad area, notes the fluctuating ownership of estates and remarks: “Many of these lands belonged to owners killed in the wars of independence, leaving their farms abandoned.”[22] The records of an area near Santa Ana (Matanzas), which I examined in 1962, suggested a similar pattern. Apart from the land owned directly by the sugar central there were forty medium-sized estates: none had possessed the same owner since the beginning of the Republic (1902), indeed, few of them had existed at that date. Most appeared to have been acquired as investment properties since the period of prosperity created by the Second World War. For from the 1940’s onwards, the countryside was increasingly repossessed by the urban nouveaux riches of Cuba. For the successful businessmen and politicians of the towns, country estates became prized insignia of prestige. These parvenu owners rarely improved productivity. The land was either left untouched (for cane-growing or rent extortion from small subsistence peasants) or else converted into grandiose “ranches” imitated from Texas, with absurdly low cattle densities: so much meat was imported from the United States that there was little point in running them efficiently.

The land census of 1946 revealed that even the characteristic circular shape of land-holdings of early nineteenth century Cuba had disappeared, except in some small areas of the backward westernmost province, Pinar de Rio. First the social cohesion, then the economic base of the traditional latifundists had been destroyed. The class was in eclipse. By the 1930’s, the Cuban power structure had decisively diverged from the Latin American norm. The classic regime of landed oligarchy had failed to crystallize.

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2. The Debility of the Bourgeoisie

Havana’s extensive and resplendent suburb of Marianao offers a vivid image of the Cuban bourgeoisie in the days of its prosperity. Its posthumous presence is eloquent: in the cemetery itself the marble vaults of the rich are fitted with internal lifts, airconditioning and telephones.

The nascent bourgeoisie of the first decades of independence had, along with all other sections of the Cuban population, suffered catastrophically from the collapse of the 20’s. In the space of one year the national income of Cuba was cut by 63 per cent; 20 Cuban banks with 334 branches and deposits of 130 million dollars were forced to close, and by 1939 foreign banks held 83 per cent of all Cuban deposits. The recovery and rise of the class began with the Second World War. High sugar prices refloated the whole economy; profits once again rapidly accrued to Cuban capitalists.[23] The value of the sugar crop rose from 110 million dollars in 1940 to 256 million in 1942, and to 677 million in 1947.[24] Bank deposits rose from 138.9 million dollars to 727.3 milion dollars in 1951, while the proportion of them held by Cuban banks climbed from 16.8 per cent in 1939 to 60.2 per cent in 1955.[25]

However, the absolute—and ostentatious—monetary wealth of this class concealed its relative economic weakness. The invasion of U.S. capital which ended the traditional aristocracy in the countryside, shackled and stunted the bourgeoisie which succeeded it. Simple percentage figures reveal the extent of U.S. control over the Cuban economy: 40 per cent of raw sugar production was U.S. owned, 23 per cent of non-sugar industry, 90 per cent of telephone and electrical services, 50 per cent of public service railways.[26] Moreover, these figures show only the scale of U.S. investment. The mode of investment was at least equally important, for it typically took the form of the establishment of subsidiaries by U.S. companies with participation by local Cuban capital or, alternately, participation by U.S. capital in already established Cuban concerns. These industries were dependent on the U.S. parent company for essential supplies, and it was often on the sales between the two that real profits were made. Lone Star Cement, U.S. Rubber, American Agricultural Chemicals, Firestone, Procter and Gamble, and others profited by arrangements of this kind. Cuban capital was thus invested not in competition but in collaboration with U.S. capital. The result was the structural integration of the Cuban bourgeoisie within the economy of an alien capitalism. For as the French economist Francois Perroux remarks: “When a large firm sets up a concern in a small country, the concern is doubtless situated in the so-called ‘national’ territory of the smaller country. In reality, however, it belongs to the firm’s own area.”[27] The de facto situation was clinched juridically. A reciprocal trade treaty in 1934 guaranteed Cuban sugar a preferential U.S. market and in return secured U.S. manufacturers a privileged entry into the Cuban market. Henceforward it was usually worthwhile for a Cuban industrialist to set up a plant in Cuba only if he could do so under some arrangement with the large U.S. corporations.

The most decisive and glaring result of this integration was that Cuban capitalists had to limit their field of operations to the boundaries set for them by North American neo-colonialism. Only sectors of the Cuban economy complementary to those of the United States could be developed. This confiscation of its economy condemned Cuba to extreme underutilization of its resources, and blocked any real economic growth. The sugar sector represented 80 per cent of exports in the 50’s and provided 25 per cent of the national income. Yet sugar production was 500,000 tons lower in 1956 than it had been in 1925.[28]In 1956 the sugar companies owned or controlled 188,000 caballerias of land; yet only 74,000 caballerias of cane were cut.[29] These vast uncultivated estates made a mockery of Cuba’s heavy food imports—in 1958, 80 million dollars worth, or 25 per cent of Cuba’s food consumption, was bought abroad.[30] The island’s other greatest natural resource suffered even worse neglect: Cuba possesses the world’s largest known deposits of nickel, but they were almost entirly unexploited.[31] The United States Government owned the deposits and kept them simply as reserves. Inevitably, the Cuban economy failed to gain any real productive impetus. The repatriated capital siphoned off to the U.S.A. amounted to 369.1 million dolars net disinvestment between 1952 and 1958.[32] G.N.P. rose by a derisory 1.4 per cent per annum between 1951 and 1958, or at a slower rate than the population.[33] In a work-force of 2,700,000, unemployment ran at 700,000 men for the greater part of the year.[34]

It is clear then that the Cuban capitalist class could not properly be described as a “national” bourgeoisie. All major sections of Cuban capital were compromised in the exploitation of Cuba by U.S. capital and collaborated as subordinates in prolonging the retardation and stagnation of the economy. The term “national” bourgeoisie is made still more inappropriate by the strikingly deracinate and expatriate composition of the Cuban capitalist class. The island’s largest “Cuban-owned” sugar enterprise was the property of Julio Lobo, a naturalized Cuban of German origin (original name Wulf), who owned sugar plantations throughout the Caribbean and a flourishing brokerage business in New York. Cuba’s largest native industrialist was Burke Hedges of “Textilera Ariguanabo”, a naturalized Cuban of U.S. origin. The largest rum-producing company, Bacardi, was owned by two families, the Espins of French origin, and the Boschs of German origin. The largest Cuban-owned bank, “El Trust Company of Cuba”, was owned by the Falla family of Spanish origin. Spanish citizens, moreover, accounted in 1943 for a full 16 percent of all the “merchants and businessmen” in the census. The Cuban bourgeoisie, in fact, lacked almost any homogeneity or “history”.