Prologue to the Cuban Revolution pt. II

This is part II of IV of Robin Blackburn's 1963 essay 'Prologue to the Cuban Revolution'. Read part I here. 

A final consideration is important. One sector, and one sector alone, of the Cuban economy showed autonomous dynamism under the neo-colonial regime: speculative construction. De luxe apartment blocks, gleaming hotels, colossal casinos shot up in Havana, which witnessed 80 per cent of all construction in Cuba in 1957.[1] Immense windfall profits were made in the property market; and a substantial rentier stratum was created. Personal incomes from urban rents ran at 99 million dollars in 1956, and at a further 74 million dollars from rural rents.[2] A significant proportion of this boom was provided by tourism. But it was a distinctive kind of tourism, drawn predominantly neither by cultural, not even particularly by climatic attractions, but by commercialized vice—prostitution and gambling. The call-houses and casinos of Havana were an international version of the classic “safety-valves” of bourgeois society. The fundamental image of in the United States was of an exotic but adjacent red-light district. This aspect of Cuban society was not merely of picturesque significance; it was of some psychological importance for the character of the Cuban bourgeoisie. The contrast has often been made, most eloquently and originally, by Frantz Fanon, between the dynamic entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of nineteenth century Europe and the corrupt and enfeebled administrative bourgeoisie of the Third World today. Fanon’s description is now classic: “It is only psychologically that it (the bourgeoisie of the Third World) identifies with the Western bourgeoisie from which it has learnt all its lessons. It imitates the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decadent period without having made the initial efforts of exploration and invention which themselves created this Western bourgeoisie. At birth the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies with the final stage of the Western bourgeoisie[...] It is already senile without ever having known the impatience, the fearlessness and the voluntarism of youth and adolescence. . . . This bourgeoisie, mediocre in its efforts, in its achievements, in its thought, attemps to mask this mediocrity by prestige achivements at the individual level, by the chrome of American cars, by Riviera holidays, by weekends in neon-lit night-clubs.”[3]

In an article which notably enriches the sociology of this class in the Third World, Claudio Veliz describes the specifically Latin American variant of it: “Finally, the outbreak of the second World War created a new situation which opened unprecedented opportunities for rapid industrial growth. European and U.S. exports ceased to read Latin American markets and, in the vacuum thus created, a fantastic mushrooming of industry took place. The consequences of this were obvious. In less than a decade, the leadership of the urban middle sectors became extremely wealthy. Using their access to the sources of power and their influence with the bureaucracy, they allocated tenders, granted licences, exercised the traditional rights of patronge, and, even without outright corruption, accumulated considerable fortunes.[...]Thus in a relatively brief period of time, the violently outspoken reformist leaders of 1938 became the sedate, technically minded, and moderate statesmen of the 1950’s. Once their foot was in the door, there was no more talk of demolition: now the problem was how to get inside the mansion of privilege.[...]Now, throughout the continent, the middle sectors are willing and ready to outdo the conservatives in their devotion to established institutions. . . . Social-climbing has thus become a political institution. It is perfectly true that this is a well-known aspect of all social change. Europe has even produced a complete gallery of caricatures and stereotypes around the ridiculous figure of the nouveau riche. But Latin America has improved on the old style by making this a mass phenomenon.”[4] It was thus of some significance that the Cuban bourgeousie could not successfully “borrow” identity from an established oligarchy. Social snobbery, however, ran rife in Havana. Spanish titles were eagerly bought and gossip columns running to several pages, with payment for insertion, helped to subsidize the newspapers and magazines. Thus while Cuba’s wealthy classes were unable to prevent the upstart “Sergeant” Batista from running the country, they consoled themselves—until 1952 at any rate—with barring him from the Havana Yacht Club because of his Afro-Chinese ancestry.

More important, however, was the distinctive cast of the Cuban bourgeoisie itself. If the “administrative” bourgeoisie of the Third World which Fanon and Dumont denounce represents an immense decline from the classic “entrepreneurial” bourgeoisie of the West, the Cuban bourgeoisie in many ways represented a debasement of even this type. The markedly parasitic character of this class in Cuba could not but have a significant effect on its cohesion and consciousness. Its ignoble role and image within the U.S. economic and socio-affective system made it almost impossible for it to have a morale of the kind which is vital to a class’s political and social efficacy.[5] A dominant social class must believe in its own necessity. The Cuban bourgeoisie was too compromised: it was never able to achieve real confidence and combativity.

The logical successor to the Cuban aristocracy thus proved little stronger than the landowners themselves.[6] The Cuban bourgeoisie had almost no independent economic base: it was profoundly and fatally integrated into the U.S. imperial economy. It had no historical or cultural cohesion: to the very end, emigrants, expatriates and adventurers dominated it. And it had no morale and little consciousness. Fidel Castro saw this and summed it up in December, 1961, when he spoke of the last Autentico President: “Whom did Prio Socorras represent? I still believe that one can say he represented what I would call the lumpen-bourgeoisie.”[7]

3. The Fiasco of the Institutional Order

The classic Latin American power structure, from Independence to this day, may be summarily described. Wealth lies in the hands of an oligarchy of landowners and businessmen, more or less aristocratic or arriviste according to the country. The property regime remains untouched, no matter what the formal political system. Surface turmoil—electoral campaigns, cabinet intrigues, armed uprisings, military putsches—is directly proportionate to structural stability. The ruling class preserves the status quo indifferently through anarchy, autocracy or “democracy”. But of its various institutional instruments, the classic trio have undoubtedly been: the Church, the Army, Political Parties. The character of each of these in Cuba is worth some examination.

Church

The Catholic Church has been a major institutional buttress of the social order everywhere in Latin America. Its economic, political and ideological power was so great in the nineteenth century that in most countries it posed the only issue which seriously disturbed the unity of the oligarchy. In the twentieth century aristocratic anti-clericalism has become an anachronism, and in nearly all Latin American countries the Church has assumed a simple, general role of social and political reaction (Colombia is perhaps the only country where lay Catholicism achieved such a pitch of fanaticism in the post-war period that oligarchic anticlericalism was preserved). For this purpose, an extensive ecclesiastical apparatus is necessary, comprising an economic base (Church lands, Vatican subventions, contributions of the faithful, etc.), local training institutions (seminaries, colleges), a numerous personnel (flourishing priesthood), a publicity network (press, radio), and a pervasive lay presence (voluntary organizations). In most Latin American countries, these conditions are amply met.

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Cuba, however, was an exception. Churches existed only in the rich suburbs and old city centres. The priesthood was woefully inadequate to its ostensible flock: there were only 725 priests in the whole island, 1 to every 7,850 parishioners (the comparable ratio for Chile is 1 for 2,750, for Venezuela 1 for 4,350, for Colombia 1 for 3,650).[8] Furthermore, the overwhelming majority —75 per cent—of these priests were not Cubans at all. They were Spaniards dispatched from Spain to maintain the Cuban Church. The hierarchy itself was Hispanized: the Archbishop of Santiago, Enrique Perez Serantes, who intervened on Fidel Castro’s behalf after the Moncada attack in 1953, for example, was a Spaniard. This phenomenon was a product of the Independence Wars, when the Church had identified itself so completely with Spanish cause that it gravely weakened its local strength in Cuba.[9] After Independence, Catholicism in Cuba became much more a diffused cultural presence, providing an (often adulterated) popular imagery and mythology, then a powerful and oppressive social institution. The findings of a Catholic Action Survey, based on 4,000 interviews, showed that: “One of every three adult Catholics never made his first communion, and only one in four fulfilled the Easter precept. Very many marriages lacked canonical validity, and considerably more than half of all Cuban Catholics approved of divorce. Religious ignorance was appalling[...]Superstitions were revealed to be flourishing... The Bayamo district, for example, had two priests and ten spirit-worship centres (i.e. for the Afro-Cuban cults. R.B.). Here one inhabitant in nine gave spirit worship as his sole religion. Vast numbers of others mixed [...] primitive jungle rites with the Christianity they professed, to the point that one Cuban in four admitted having gone at some time to placate the spirits or get their advice.”[10]

Thus, when the Revolution came, the Church was unable to put up any serious resistance. The comparison with, say, Argentina, is instructive. The social programme of Peron was infinitely less radical than that of the Cuban Revolution, yet when the Church joined the opposition a successful uprising was almost immediately precipitated. Faced with a far greater challenge in Cuba, it was helpless. The Church was politically a broken reed in Cuba.

Political Parties

It is an error to imagine that political life in Latin America is, or has been in the past, virtually reducible to personalized military putsches. Parliamentary interludes have, in some countries and in some periods, been reasonably lengthy and relatively orderly. Even where—as has been much more frequent—these interludes have been brief and brutally ended, important residual phenomena have persisted. In particular, the major political parties have usually survived, or more often, “inhabited” prolonged military dictatorship. The demarcation between civilian and military rule has consequently never been very sharp in Latin America; in this sense the durability of political parties is a more revealing sociological index in Latin American countries than the durability of parliamentarism.

The typical political formations of nineteenth and early twentieth century Latin America made up an almost indistinguishable dyad, the Liberal and Conservative Parties. This couplet was found throughout the continent: in Mexico, in Venezuela, in Colombia, in Ecuador, in Chile. Almost everywhere, the sole substantial difference between these alternate factions of the oligarchy was their attitude to the Church. The Liberals were anticlerical, the Conservatives ultra-montane. The economic regimes of each were virtually identical. Political rule by one or the other was indifferently civilian or military: there were as many Liberal Dictators (e.g. Guzman Blanco in Venezuela) as Conservative Presidents (e.g. Montt in Chile). Together they formed what might be called the Twin-Party System. Despite their sociological and political identity, however, the two parties became established institutions with, in many countries, a significant degree of continuity and tradition. In some countries they have survived down to the present. In the most Catholicized country in Latin America, Colombia, the Liberal-Conservative opposition dominates formal political life to this day.

It is against this background that the political parties of independent Cuba should be seen. There, as elsewhere, a Liberal and a Conservative Party were formed, and the two parties furnished the Presidents of the initial decades of the Republic: Estrada Palma, Gomez, Menocal, Zayas.[11] This was also the period of repeated and regular U.S. intervention: 1906–1909, 1912, 1915, 1917, 1920. The creaking and corrupt parliamentary façade of the Cuban Republic was successfully sustained by U.S. military presence. This phase came to an end with the ascension to power of the Liberal Gerardo Machado in 1925, and the onset of the world depression. The economic and social effects of the sugar slump have already been noted. Machado installed a sanguinary personal dictatorship which lasted until 1933, when a wave of student attentats, followed by a general strike, forced him into exile.

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In this revolutionary situation, senior officers of the Cuban Army in collusion with the U.S. Special Representative in the island, Sumner Welles, established a conventional conservative government. Symbolically, the President in this last flickering hour of the traditional regime in Cuba, was the aristocrat Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, grandson of the latifundist author of the Declaration of Yara. Three weeks later he was overthrown, and his class effectively disappeared from Cuban history.

The Revolution of 1933 was the achievement of a coalition of university students and army sergeants, which seized power on September 5. Ramon Grau San Martin, leader of the Student Directorate, became President and Fulgencio Batista, the stenographer-sergeant leader of the insurgent non-commissioned officers, became Chief of Staff. The revolutionary government nationalized the island’s U.S.-owned electrical company and promised to distribute land to the peasants. Four months later Batista, urged on by Sumner Welles, who regarded the revolution as “ultra-radical” and “frankly communistic”,[12] suppressed his student allies, murdered their left-wing leader Antonio Gutierrez, and abandoned their program of reform and anti-imperialism. A socialist jacqueriethat had broken out in the countryside was brutally quelled. The United States immediately recognized the new regime.

Batista ruled as de facto dictator for six years, from 1934 to 1940. In 1940 he was elected President against Grau in a relatively open plebiscitary election. But effective parliamentary life was suspended for a decade; it was only really resumed again as the Second World War drew to a close. Batista himself inaugurated Cuba’s second—and last—parliamentary period. Convinced that he could win an open election, he allowed one. His candidate, Carlos Saladrigas, lost, although only by a narrow margin. To general surprise, he accepted the defeat and retired to Miami with the spoils of office.

The interlude was to be brief. The second parliamentary period failed even more wretchedly than the first in establishing stable and meaningful political parties, let alone a working parliamentary system as such. The Cuban political scene was an inextricable confusion of volatile and venal factions, devoid of any program or ideology, competing avidly for office and wealth. A North American political scientist has described the 1940 Assembly: “More or less nebulous majority and minority blocs took form with líderes or leaders nominally in charge of each.”[13] The old Conservative and Liberal Parties had shown no staying power; after the 1933 Revolution they were shadows of their former selves. The victor of the 1944 election was Grau San Martin. Grau was head of the Autentico Party (Partido Revolucionario Cubano), theoretically left-wing and faithful to the ideals of the 1933 Revolution. Yet the Autentico Party won both the 1944 and 1948 elections (when Carlos Prió Socorrás became President) in coalition with the ultra-right Republican Party. The Autentico government was in alliance with the Communist Party from 1945 to 1947; in 1947 turned on the party and purged the trade-unions of Communists; but the major Autentico tradeunionist, Eusebio Mujal, who became secretary-general of the Cuban Confederation of Labour (C.T.C.) under Prio, himself later defected to Batista—supposedly the sworn enemy of the Autenticos. The opposition showed little more coherence. The successful coalition in the 1940 election which supported Batista included the National Party, the Democratic Party, the National Democratic Party, the Communist Party, the Conservative Party, and the Liberal Party. Under the Autentico regimes of the early post-war years, the major opposition party was the newly-formed (1947) Ortodoxo Party. This had no independent political or sociological content; it was founded by the Autentico Senator Eddy Chibas in protest against Autentico corruption, and its only platform was the “broom”. Anarchic violence and terrorism were endemic. Despite the return to parliamentarism, the politics of pistolerismo were still rife. The U.S. scholar William Stokes remarks: “Important terrorist cells, clubs and movements continued to exist . . . the 1948 election was marked by the exploding of bombs in ministeries, the machine gunning of prominent figures, including officers of the student body of the University, the discovery of a cache of arms on the University Campus.”[14] In the seven years of Autentico government, no serious social legislation of any kind was passed. An attempted purge of the army failed to remove important Batistianos. The single public political issue was corruption. And it is certain that if the 1952 election had been held, the candidate of the Ortodoxo Party would have won campaigning solely on the issue of Autentico venality. Grau was reliably believed to have stolen the ceremonial emerald embedded in the Chamber of the Cuban Senate. Prio surpassed his predecessor; the end of his administration saw a frenzied, wholesale plunder of public funds. A Time magazine report captures the flavour of the Cuban Parliamentarism of the period, and of the tone of comment on it in the United States. Reminiscing about those “seven years of riotously rotten government”, it recalled the final exit of Jose Aleman, Minister of Education in the Grau government, from Cuban political life: “On the afternoon of October 10, 1948, he (Aleman) and some henchman drove four Ministry of Education trucks into the Treasury building. All climbed out carrying suitcases. ‘What are you going to do, rob the Treasury?’ joshed a guard. ‘Quien sabe?’ replied baby-faced Jose Aleman. Forthwith his men scooped pesos, francs, escudos, lire, rubles, pounds sterling and about 19 million dollars in U.S. currency into the suitcases. The trucks made straight for the airfield, where a chartered DC-3 stood waiting.”[15]