Prologue to the Cuban Revolution pt. III

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

The true character of the parliamentary regime was conclusively revealed by the manner of its termination. Just as the interlude had begun at Batista’s fiat, so Batista ended it, when he wished and how he wished, without bloodshed. On the night of March 10, 1952, he effortlessly and almost single-handedly reassumed control. There was no resistance, scarcely even token opposition, from the Government Party, the legislature, the executive, the press or the judiciary. No government was ever more supine; no coup smoother.

A final footnote completes this miserable record. It is striking that even today, in the most extreme adversity and under intense U.S. pressure, the exiled Cuban bourgeoisie has failed to produce a single large, stable, counter-revolutionary party. The Autentico and Ortodoxo parties have disappeared along with their predecessors. In Miami a myriad miniscule and fratricidal cliques dispute their abysmal heritage.

Of the classic institutional instruments of rule in Latin America, the Cuban bourgeoisie proved utterly unable to create a lasting or coherent party system. The failure of parliamentarism in Cuba was a common enough phenomenon. But the complete failure to crystallize durable, substantial political parties was exceptional even in Latin America. The debility and disarticulation of the Cuban bourgeoisie were nowhere more evident.

Army

The Army has, of course, historically been the prime instrument of oligarchic domination in Latin America. Its officer corps has been overwhelmingly recruited from aristocratic and merchant families. In the twentieth century it has provided a certain limited escalator for sons of professional families and white-collar groups. But the attraction of right-militarist ideologies has nearly always neutralized the class origin of these new entrants and absorbed them into a reactionary and repressive elite. The innumerable coups and countercoups which mark the Latin American scene have normally been essentially sub-political products of inter-service or inter-officer rivalry. The oligarchic character and role of the armed forces have remained unaltered.

The Cuban Army of the first decades of the Republic was unmistakably of this kind: it was a small, U.S.-created force, designed by West Point officers to replace the revolutionary armies of the War of Independence which the U.S. expeditionary corps had deliberately disbanded a decade before. Its early history was uneventful. However, with the accession of Machado (himself a General) to power in 1925, the Army became directly compromised with the prevailing dictatorship. Then, when Machado was overthrown in 1933 and Cespedes installed as the new President, something unique in Latin American history happened. In alliance with revolutionary student groups, the sergeants of the Cuban Army led the enlisted men in a revolt against their officers. The four-hundred strong officer corps barricaded themselves in Havana’s Hotel Nacional, which had just been proclaimed by Sumner Welles a place of refuge for all U.S. citizens in the fighting. . . . Welles and his assistant, Adolph Berle, interposed themselves between the officers and the insurgents in the lounge of the hotel. Negotiations finally secured the withdrawal of all United States citizens from the building. The sergeants’ and students’ forces stormed the hotel, and half the officer corps lost their lives in the fighting, and in their subsequent imprisonment. The remainder lost their positions. The traditional military elite was annihilated overnight. Nothing like this had ever happened in Latin America. There had been “colonels’ ” and even “lieutenants’ ” revolts before, when junior officers, influenced by nationalism or an inchoate reformism, had risen against senior officers of an older generation (the Brazilian tenente revolts of the 20’s were of this kind, and Peronism in its initial phase had much of this character). But there had never been an assault on the whole officer class from the ranks below it. As Edwin Lieuwen writes: “The Cuban revolution that brought Fulgencio Batista to power in 1933 was unique in being a mutiny of the rank and file, which toppled the old officer corps along with the government.”[1]

The Sergeants’ Revolt destroyed the Army as an instrument of traditional oligarchic rule. It did not replace with a stable institution of middle-class character. Here, as elsewhere, the Cuban bourgeoisie failed to create its own institutions. Batista, a man of Afro-Chinese descent and peasant origin, converted the Cuban Army into a personal machine. His friends and fellow sergeants monopolized the command structure of the armed services. Batista increased the size of the army from 12,000 to 16,000 men, raised the pay of officers and men, and allocated 22 per cent of the budget to military expenditure. However, despite this fortification, the Batista machine was politically isolated, since it possessed no real roots in local class formations. It was thus forced to make such internal alliances as it could, within the limits set by the U.S. international and economic policy of the period. The dictatorship remained, of course, the guarantor of the capitalist order in Cuba, but this was because of the context external to it, not because of its class content or ideological orientation. Within the limits of this context, its policy was purely opportunist.

Thus, the distinctive feature of the first Batista dictatorship was its “social” policy. A period of intense labour unrest, rural uprisings and brutal repression, culminating in an unsuccessful general strike in 1935, followed by the installation of the dictatorship. In 1937, however, Batista changed his tactics. Fearing the growing isolation of his regime, he began to make overtures to the trade-union movement. In 1939 he allowed the formation of the Cuban Confederation of Labour, of which a Communist (Lazaro Peña) became Secretary-General. Thenceforward, the Cuban working-class won a number of important concessions. Minimum wage-levels, an eight-hour day, a month’s paid annual holiday and guarantees against dismissal were secured. Many of these provisions were even, at Communist insistence, written into the new Constitution proclaimed in 1940. The “Report on Cuba” of the I.B.R.D. (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) was later to comment: “The political strength of organized labour... has become very great since the political and social revolution of 1933... Before the 1933 Revolution the Government was usually on the side of employers in disputes with the workers. Since, the pendulum has swung so far to the other extreme that it is now employers and investors who complain that every issue seems to be settled against them.”[2] By the end of the first Batista dictatorship, Cuban labour legislation was among the most advanced in Latin America. It was against this background that Batista was able to win a genuine victory in the elections of July 1940.

When Batista seized power again in 1952, he immediately attempted to recreate the entente which had won him popular support before. Eusebio Mujal, the Autentico Secretary-General of the C.T.C., was summoned to the Presidential Palace and a working agreement was arrived at. However, this alliance at the summit failed to “take” at the base of the union movement. The Communist Party, which had supported the Batista regime in the 40’s, was now cool. The rank-and-file of the unions were almost as mistrustful of Mujal as the I.C.F.T.U. was enthusiastic. In 1955, for instance, the sugar workers staged a successful national strike in defiance of Mujal’s instructions.

From 1957 onwards, as the Revolutionary forces consolidated their position in the Sierra Maestra, while the urban resistance of the 26th of July Movement increased its activity in the towns, the dictatorship became more and more isolated. An assassination attempt against Batista, an unsuccessful general strike and an abortive naval revolt followed in quick succession. As students, workers and even naval officers went over to the opposition, the regime struck out blindly in retaliation.[3] The more isolated it became, the more it relied on terror to survive, and the more it increased its isolation. By 1958, it no longer had any support outside itself: it was a pure apparatus of terror and extortion. In its second period, the Batista regime was personified in the international gangsters and adventurers who bedecked it at all echelons. Rolando Masferrer (El Tigre), a Spanish renegade from the Republican Army in the Civil War, ruled Oriente Province with a private army of 2,000 para-military terrorists whose characteristic insignia were the baseball-cap and the mobile short-wave radio patrol car (micro-onda). Meyer Lansky, a Russian-born and U.S. naturalized gangster identified by the Kefauver Committee as one of the six most powerful racketeers in the United States, controlled Havana’s vast gambling concerns and built the last and most lavish of Cuba’s luxury hotels, the Riviera.[4] Amadeo Barletta, an Italian who had been a member of Mussolini’s General Council, monopolized Cuba’s lucrative Cadillac concession and was the island’s largest newspaper owner. In men like these, the carrion character of Cuban capital found its last and purest expression. Their predominance marked the impending collapse of the regime. The end came suddenly: within four weeks of Guevara’s march on Santa Clara, although his armies were still in the field, Batista fled by air with retainers and treasury to Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Alone, Masferrer’s army in Oriente fought on into January.

The Batista dictatorships were the most distinctive and durable institutional product of pre-revolutionary Cuban society. It has been seen how Batista’s power was originally founded on the destruction of the old officer class in the army. After a period of wholesale repression, the regime attempted to acquire a popular base by means of a tactical alliance with the trade-union and political organizations of the working-class—a rapprochement facilitated by the Second World War. It was at no point, however, a populist phenomenon of the recognizable Latin American kind; it had more affinity with those demagogically “social” dictatorships which mimic the programmes of populism without its character as a movement. These dirigiste simulacra of populism have been almost as common as populism itself in Latin America: Odria in Peru, Ibanez in Chile, Rojas Pinilla in Colombia have provided notable examples. When Batista reassumed power in 1952, he tried to repeat this formula, but with decreasing success. The dictatorship, which came to be infiltrated with expatriates, swiftly became hated by all sections of the population. By the end, its armed apparatus stood alone. It had always been an arbitrary and contingent structure. It became a senseless and untenable one. Although the military strength of the regime was still ostensibly great, the evacuation of December 1958 was inevitable.

The pre-revolutionary Cuban Republic thus saw a generalized debacle of its institutions. An examination of church, political parties and army confirms the characterization of the Cuban capitalist class suggested above. In his book Rural Cuba—perhaps the most serious single work on twentieth-century Cuba— the U.S. sociologist, Lowry Nelson, confessed to “bafflement” before Cuban social structure, and wrote: “One has the general feeling that Cuban society has not ‘set’ or ‘gelled’.”[5] The preceding analyses explain this crucial facet of Cuban society. A century of successive shocks radically and repeatedly shattered and destructured Cuban society. The bitter wars against Spain, the savage expansion of sugar, the wild cycle of boom and slump, the crushing influx of foreign capital radically smashed Cuban social structure and replaced it only with an inchoate, volcanic magma. No durable social forms coalesced. A proto-bourgeoisie never achieved true consciousness of its interests and identity; lacking elementary class consciousness, it never discovered class solidarity. It produced no institutions. Lumpenized, destructured, disintegrated, it failed to lodge itself lastingly in Cuban history. When the guerilla troops entered Havana on January 1, 1959, its extinction was close.

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4. Aspects of the Revolution

The history of the insurrectionary war against Batista is sufficiently well known to need no lengthy account here. A brief summary will recall the main episodes. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro attacked Moncada Barracks in Santiago with 125 men. The assault was a failure, and Fidel and his surviving companions were jailed for two years on the Isle of Pines. In 1955 they were amnestied by Batista and went into exile. On December 2, 1956, Fidel Castro landed in Oriente Province in a yacht from Mexico with 82 men and a supply of arms. Batista’s troops ambushed them shortly after the landing, and in all only twelve escaped, including Fidel, his brother Raul and Che Guevara. A revolt in Santiago timed to coincide with the landing was pitilessly crushed. The twelve survivors of the landing retreated into inaccessible depths of the Sierra Maestra mountains.

Early in 1957, on March 13, a group of conspirators, including the president of the Havana student union, Jose Antonio Echevarría, and Autentico elements, launched an assault on the Presidential Palace in Havana, and tried to assassinate Batista. Nearly all were killed in the attempt. Two months later, on May 28, the tiny group of guerillas in the Sierra Maestra made their first attack on a military post outside the mountain area, on the coast near Manzanillo. On June 30 Francisco Pais, head of the Santiago resistance and national co-ordinator of the urban groups of the 26th of July Movement, was caught and killed in Santiago. A general strike which was attempted by the 26th of July Movement in August failed. On September 5, naval officers rose in the port of Cienfuegos on the Atlantic Coast and seized the town. The population enthusiastically joined the revolt, but it was crushed by a combined air-and-ground attack.

The end of 1957 saw the continuation of guerrilla war in Oriente Province, and acts of sabotage and terrorism in some of the main Cuban towns. Rebel control of the mountain area of Oriente steadily increased, despite numerous airlifts of troops to the province. In the spring of 1958, Raul Castro and Juan Almeida opened a “second front” in the Sierra Cristal, in the north of Oriente. Another general strike, however, on April 9, was a failure. In May and June, government troops attempted to penetrate the Sierra Maestra in force. They were thrown back, one battalion surrendering to the rebels. By August the rebel position in Oriente was considerably strengthened; the mountain area was clear of Batista’s units, and Raul’s force was firmly established in the coffee highlands to the north. Finally, two columns, headed by Guevara and Cienfuegos, moved eastwards, down into the plains of Camaguey and Las Villas provinces.

In November and December, Fidel, Raul and Almeida, moving swiftly across Oriente, cut the communications of the big urban garrisons of the province, and began attacking and taking command posts in the coastal plain, and then some of the smaller towns. Batista’s forces were now visibly disintegrating; Sancti Spiritus, Guantanamo and Trinidad fell to the rebels. Finally, Guevara’s column in Las Villas encircled the city of Santa Clara, destroyed an armoured train sent up from Havana to relieve the town, and then, on December 31, 1958, took Santa Clara itself. A few hours later, at dawn on January 1, 1959, Batista flew into exile. For a week, the Oriente rebels marched in triumphal procession across the island, and on January 8 entered Havana with Fidel at their head. A vast, joyful reception met them.

What social forces overthrew Batista? This crucial question can only be answered by some attempt at a precise assessment of the scale and structure of the revolutionary movement in Cuba.

It is, in the first place, clear that in both military and political terms the decisive revolutionary organization was the guerrilla army of the Sierra Maestra, The urban resistance of the 26th July Movement, although of considerable psychological importance, was politically and strategically a secondary phenomenon. What was the real character, then, of the Rebel Army?

A current North American version of this force is that it consisted of a peasant rank-and-file, “officered” by young “middleclass” revolutionaries. As all armies have a plebeian rank-and-file, the argument goes, the social character of an army is uniquely determined by its officer corps: the Rebel Army had “middleclass” officers, therefore it was a middle-class army. For it was the “desertion of the middle-class—on which Batista’s power was based—that caused his regime to disintegrate from within and his army to evaporate.”[6] Thus the Cuban Revolution itself “was essentially a middle-class revolution that has been used to destroy the middle-class.”[7]

It is true, of course, that Batista objectively preserved the capitalist order in Cuba. But it is quite inadmissible to pass from this to the conclusion that Batista’s power rested on the middleclass. A passing acquaintance with Cuban history should be enough to avoid this error: Batista’s power rested on the army and on support from the United States. Because the vast mass of the middle-class was the passive spectator of Batista’s coup, the thesis asserts that his power was based on it. Similarly, despite the evident fact that the vast mass of the middle-class was the passive spectator of the revolution against Batista, his downfall can be attributed to it. The young revolutionaries of the Sierra Maestra were often of middle-class origin, but it is absurd to conclude from this that the middle-class in any way acted as a class through them. The truth is that the middle-class as a class took almost no action either to support or to overthrow Batista. Its nature and history had not equipped it to play any such role.

So much for the middle-class character of the Rebel Army. The complementary argument, that the social origin of the guerrilla rank-and-file should be discounted, since all rank-and-file soldiers are peasant or working-class, is equally aberrant. The “rank-and-file” of the Rebel Army were, of course, volunteers, and as such, qualitatively distinct from conscripted or professional soldiers. The conundrum that the “Cuban Revolution was essentially a middle-class revolution that has been used to destroy the middleclass” is quite empty: it is based on no more than some elementary category confusions.

Returning to the real questions posed by the Rebel Army, the first and simple fact to register is the tiny size of the forces operating in the Sierra Maestra. Probably at no point throughout the war did the entire Rebel Army number more than 1,500–2,000 men in arms.[8] It is thus very doubtful whether the question— what social forces did the Rebel Army represent?—has any directly meaningful answer at all. A group is only a primarily sociological phenomenon given certain conditions—the first of which is size. The miniscule dimensions of the guerrilla army— 1,500 men out of a population of 6,000,000—make it almost impossible to read a real significant representativity out of it. This is the first and fundamental point to be made about the Rebel Army.

Having said this, however, some—cautious—characterizing remarks are obviously possible. The social origin of the rebel leaders was mixed. Many came from middle-class backgrounds but did not have middle-class occupations—they were too young. These comprised the important student element in the Revolution (Raul Castro, Faure Chaumon). Some had professional qualifications: lawyers (Fidel Castro, Oscaldo Dorticos), doctors (Faustino Perez, Rene Vallejo), teachers (Francisco Pais). Some were whitecollar workers (Abel Santamaria, Jesus Montane of the Moncada attack). Others were drawn from the urban unemployed (Camilo Cienfuegos, Ephigenio Almejeiras) and the peasantry (Ciro Redondo, Guillermo Garcia). It has been seen how meaningless it is to call this heterogeneous group a “middle-class force”. If any single term is applicable, the majority of them might be described as “revolutionary intellectuals” in the sense in which the Second Declaration of Havana speaks of a revolutionary intelligentsia. In the plundered and subordinated Latin American societies of today, the formation of a dissident intelligentsia in revolt against the social order as a whole (and often its own inherited social milieu) is widely-attested phenomenon. A movement of revulsion and protest which in other countries has been limited to individuals, has in these societies taken on collective, near-sociological dimensions. Claudio Veliz, in the article cited above, writes: “The intelligentsia ceased to identify itself with the political, social and economic leadership of the urban middle sectors soon after the Second World War, when it became obvious that the new radical plutocrats had abandoned their reformist programmes and were committed to a defence of the established institutional structure. This clear divergence of goals and attitudes has led to a remarkable situation in which a vast urban middle sector has been openly, and rather ignominiously, abandoned by its own intellectuals. This development is not as common as it sounds. The intelligentsia of the rising English middle-class was definitely identified with its social and political leadership. Dickens, for instance, as Orwell points out, thought that the remedy for the evils he described in English society was bourgeois decency not socialist revolt. The opposite is true of Latin America today. Most of the continent’s intellectuals are in opposition and have adopted a quiet but forcefully critical attitude...” In Cuba, the leadership of the revolution came perhaps nearer to this description—although their criticism was the criticism of arms—than to any other. Its ideological formation has been described by Che: “The principal actors of the revolution had no coherent theoretical criteria: but it cannot be said that they were entirely ignorant of the various concepts of history, society, economics and revolution which are being discussed in the world today.”[9] However, the “intellectual” character of the rebel leadership should not in turn be exaggerated: many of the guerrilla commanders (Almeida, Garcia, Cienfuegos) were clearly not members of an intelligentsia, however defined.

Turning to the base of the Rebel Army, a number of considerations are important. In the first place, there is no doubt that the great majority of the guerrilla fighters in the Sierra Maestra were peasants—probably about 75 per cent.[10] A private may not define the character of a professional army; a volunteer unquestionably defines the character of a guerrilla army. In this sense, the Rebel Army was certainly a peasant force. Furthermore, a successful guerrilla force cannot be considered in abstraction from the social field in which it operates. The two form a socio-ecological whole. In Mao’s famous image, if the guerrilla fighters are fish, the rural population which hides them and sustains them is the water in which the fish swim and without which they cannot live. In Cuba, this indispensable medium was the destitute peasantry—the poorest in the island—of the Sierra Maestra. The character of the Rebel Army was thus doubly peasant: it was peasant both in its men and in its maintaining milieu.

However, to say this is not to say that it “represented the Cuban peasantry”. The sheer size of the army precluded this in any literal sense. There were perhaps 1,200 peasants in all in the Rebel Army; the rural population of Cuba is 3,000,000. Moreover, the geographical area of the rebellion was a very specific one: the backward mountainous region of Oriente Province. The peasantry of this zone—numbering some 40,000 families—was not typical of Cuba as a whole: it was a small subsistence peasantry, growing beans and malanga on rented plots, and—in the north—coffee as a cash-crop. This mountain peasantry was economically and culturally distinct from the rural proletariat of the sugar-plantations of the Cuban plains. Che has said: “We ought to mention, out of respect for the truth, that the first territory occupied by the Rebel Army, made up of survivors of the defeated column that had arrived aboard the Granma, was inhabited by a class of peasants different in its cultural and social roots from those that dwell in the regions of extensive, semi-mechanized Cuban agriculture. In fact, the Sierra Maestra, locale of the first revolutionary base, is a section that serves as a refuge to all those country workers who struggle daily against the landlords. They go there as squatters belonging to the state or some rapacious landowner, searching for a piece of land that will bring them some wealth. They must fight continuously against the exactions of the soldiers, always allied with the land-owning power; their horizon does not go beyond a document to the title of their land. The soldiers that made up our first guerrilla army of country people came from the part of this social class which shows its love for the possession of land most aggressively, which expresses most perfectly the spirit catalogued as petty bourgeois; the campesino fights because he wants land for himself and for his children; he wants to be able to manage it, sell it and make himself rich through his work.”[11]

Thus, apart from the numerical limitations of the Rebel Army, its geographical composition was not representative of the Cuban rural world as a whole. It was never simply “the Cuban peasantry in arms.”[12] It was, rather, an authentic expression of the dramatic encounter between a dedicated revolutionary leadership and the mountain peasantry of the Sierra Maestra. The survivors of the Granma were able to strike root in the mountains solely because they demonstrated their programme in action. Guevara has described how the tiny guerrilla band passed from being “merely tolerated” by the peasants to being concretely helped, supplied with food, information, and, most important of all, recruits: “This was not due to any miracle but only to our programme of action in the question of agriculture and schooling.”[13] By the summer of 1958 the Rebel Army administered an area of 5,000 square miles; it had carried out an agrarian reform which included the distribution of 6,000 head of cattle, and had established 25 schools.[14] By the end of the war, significant sections of the Sierra Maestra peasantry had been radically politicized. The impact of this experience on the revolutionary leadership was equally profound. Again, Guevara writes: “The men who arrive in Havana after two years of arduous struggle in the mountains and plains of Oriente, in the plains of Camaguey, in the mountains, plains and cities of Las Villas, are not the same men ideologically, that landed on the beaches of Los Colorados, or who took part in the first phase of the struggle. Their distrust of the campesino has been converted into admiration and respect for his virtues: their total ignorance of life in the country has been converted into a knowledge of the needs of our guajiros; their flirtations with statistics and with theory have been fixed by the cement that is practice.” This juncture between the revolutionary leadership and the mountain peasantry was to have immense importance for the future of the revolution.

It remains to make some brief comment on the character and extent of the urban resistance of the 26th of July Movement. The strength of this resistance varied regionally. It was most active in Eastern Cuba, particularly in Santiago, where Pais had great popularity. There was also an effective group in Cienfuegos. The Havana resistance, despite the presence of revolutionary student groups like the Directorio Revolucionario, was relatively weak. The average numerical strength of these groups is suggested by Robert Taber’s revealing account of the abortive general strike of April 9, 1958. Taber, who was in Cuba with the resistance, relates how the Havana 26th July Movement claimed it would produce two thousand “front-line fighters” for the expected clashes during the strike. The strike was a failure over most of the island, including Havana. Taber comments: “The two thousand adequately armed and trained ‘front-line fighters’ did not exist. It is doubtful that there were two hundred.”[15] Thus at no time did the resistance in Cuban cities compare as a force with, say, the F.L.N. in Algiers. The composition of the groups in the towns was varied. According to a former member of the Havana 26th July Movement, Javier Pazos, “of the militants in the action groups, some were students, others were workers who were either unemployed or sick of a corrupt trade union in league with Batista.”[16] At the same time, the political and social composition of the leadership of the urban resistance does not seem to have been markedly different from that of the Rebel Army—there is no real basis for opposing one to the other, as has sometimes been done. Armando Hart and Faustino Perez, head of the Havana section, Osvaldo Dorticos and Emilio Aragones, chiefs of the Cienfuegos group, Faure Chaumon and Louis Wangüemert, leaders of the Revolutionary Directorate, are all prominent members of the revolutionary regime today.

These, then, were the effective historical forces which overthrew Batista: a handful of revolutionaries leading miniscule units recruited from the mountain peasantry of Oriente Province, supported by even smaller, sporadic resistance groups in some of Cuba’s towns. By the end of the war, Batista still had 30,000 men in the field, equipped with tanks, artillery, helicopters, jet-fighters, bombers. How was the apparently miraculous rebel victory possible?

The real history of the war against Batista was the way in which a small group of revolutionaries were able to awaken political consciousness against the regime in almost every section of Cuban society. From the beginning, the guerrillas depended for their existence on the goodwill of the mountain peasantry. If the guerrillas were to do more than simply exist in the mountains, they had to enlist the active help and support of the peasantry. Once they were established in the Sierra Maestra, their task was to transform in the island as a whole resigned acceptance of the regime into positive hostility. They succeeded in this, and it was enough to destroy Batista. The real role of the Rebel Army, then, was not just military. As soon as the existence of the guerrillas in the Sierra was made known to the population as a whole (by Herbert Matthews’ reportage of February 1957), the entire character of the opposition to Batista changed. Prior to the Rebel invasion, the opposition to the regime had been so inadequate that in 1955 Batista had virtually staged a mock coup against himself in order to smoke out those he distrusted. From February 1957 onwards, the resistance to Batista acquired a permanent focus in the Sierra Maestra, which assisted—and united—even opposition groups at that time extremely antipathetic to the 26th July Movement and to each other, from Prio’s Organizacion Autentica to the Communist Party. From March 1958 onwards, the rebels in the Sierra were able to reach the civilian population of Cuba directly through the Radio Rebelde, which became an extremely important political weapon. Thus, although the almost universal hostility that had been aroused throughout the island was translated into action only by the miniscule but suicidally brave Rebel Army and urban resistance, this was quite enough to complete the demoralization of the army and persuade its leaders that further fighting was useless. By the end, Batista’s regime was hated everywhere in Cuba, and its own paid personnel were deserting it. The military and political credit for its defeat was unchallengeably that of the Rebel Army. Proof of this was provided by the tumultuous welcome which met Fidel’s triumphal progress along the whole length of the island from Santiago to Havana.[17]

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At the same time, the astonishing history of Batista’s overthrow was only possible because of the particular historical nature of Cuban society. Compared with all other revolutionary wars of the last decades, Cuba’s was short: almost exactly two years.[18] Compared with all revolutionary armies, Cuba’s was tiny. The speed of its victory was possible because the enemy it fought was fundamentally so weak. No coherent ruling-class had ever established stable domination of the Cuban Republic. There were no powerful institutions or ideology to oppose: only the isolated and opportunist Batista machine. In this light, the otherwise magical victory of the insurrection becomes rational.[19] More, the very character of the revolutionary regime which succeeded it—which so much puzzled the world in the following years—becomes explicable. The unprecedented hallmarks of the revolutions—its lack of party or an ideology—were the logical product of a prerevolutionary society which itself lacked any decisive institutional or ideological structures. There were no institutions in Cuba of a kind to force the revolution, over decades of testing struggle, to create iron counter-institutions of its own, as happened in Russia and China. There was no enveloping, pervasive reactionary ideology to combat either. The enemy was a starkly corrupt and asocial machine. Its character determined the condition of its overthrow.

In the final analysis, the nature of the war against Batista is best suggested in a remark of Engels’, in a letter he wrote to Vera Zasulich in 1885. In it, he spoke of: “exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful of people to make a revolution, i.e. with one little push to cause a whole system, which (to use a metaphor of Plekhanov’s) is in more than labile equilibrium to come crashing down and thus by an action in itself insignificant to release explosive forces that afterwards become uncontrollable.” Batista’s armies required more than “one little push” to bring them crashing down. But it was the special fragility of the second sergeant’s regime that allowed an undeveloped revolutionary movement to sweep it away. In doing so, the struggle of a “handful” of revolutionaries awakened explosive forces which were to destroy a whole social order and to create a new society in its place.

The triumphal entry of the Rebel Army into Havana captured the imagination of the world. The events which followed it came as a thunderbolt to foreign observers. Their tempo and scale were utterly unforeseen outside Cuba. The cataract speed of the social and political revolution in Cuba was far faster than that of the comparable progress in Russia and China after the conquest of power. Within six months of the entry into Havana, a radical Agrarian Reform was realized. Within twenty months nearly all U.S. property in Cuba was expropriated. Within twenty-two months the vast majority of Cuban firms were expropriated. Within thirty months a U.S.-backed counter-revolutionary invasion had been fought and defeated. Within thirty-six months Fidel Castro announced that he was a Marxist-Leninist and that the Revolution was a Marxist-Leninist Revolution. Within forty months he had publicly denounced the de-facto Secretary-General of the new Cuban Revolutionary Party for, in effect, Stalinism. Within forty-two months Cuba was officially recognized by Russia and China as an integral part of the Communist world. Within forty-six months it was the scene of the first international nuclear crisis.

What caused this evolution? How was it possible? The war against Batista was fought, as we have seen, with the almost universal support of the Cuban population but with the active participation of only miniscule groups. The next question to ask is what kind of social panorama did the Rebel Army debouch onto, when it came down from the mountains and into power? So far in this study, deliberately only the top layer of Cuban society has been examined. It is now necessary to consider its “Lower Depths”. The following major exploited groups can be distinquished:[20]

(1) Urban Proletariat. 400,000. The working class was highly organized in (often very corrupt) unions. It was divided by a wide fan of wage-differentials, running from a typical textile worker’s wage of 40 dollars a month to an electrical worker’s 500 dollars. It had a considerable political tradition, although of a markedly economist kind.

(2) “Petit Bourgeoisie.” Perhaps 250,000. The term can only be used in a very analogical sense. It covers essentially an army of petty traders, domestic servants, waiters, entertainers, and procurers. This proliferating, parasitic mass was created by the combination of unemployment with the luxury lifestyles of the local rich and the tourists. The exact size of this group is difficult to estimate. Many of them were seasonally employed, and so might be included in the next category.

(3) Unemployed. 700,000. The number of those unemployed for the greater part of the year was almost double that of the working-class itself. The unemployed were mainly encamped in the shanty towns which surround Havana and other urban centres. About half of them found jobs in the countryside during the sugar harvest as canecutters. The rest, if they were lucky, might find a few months’ work each year in construction, or might temporarily join the previous or subsequent groups.

(4) Rural Workers. 570,000. Like the urban working-class, this group was divided into different sections. The major differentiation was between mobile labourers and those workers permanently employed in the sugar-mills, on cattle ranches or on tobacco vegas. The 50,000 millworkers were an economically privileged elite in the countryside: they received a total annual income equal to the total payment of over 500,000 cane-cutters.

(5) Minifundist Peasantry. Perhaps 250,000. There were about 135,000 minifundia (farms under 50 hectares and averaging, 15 hectares) in Cuba. According to the 1946 census, 35% of these peasants were small tenant farmers, 25% were small-holders, 25% were share-croppers (partidarios), 10% were squatters (precaristas) and 5% were sub-tenant farmers. However, the census certainly under-estimated the number of sharecroppers and squatters. Many of the eloquently named precaristas seasonally moved into the category of canecutters.

These five categories comprised the main exploited classes and excluded groups of Cuba. Together, they numbered something over 2,000,000 out of an employable workforce of 2,500,000–2,750,000.

This tabulation must be set against some general comments on the oppressed classes of Latin American societies, however brief and inadequate. The central, determining fact of Latin American history has been the failure of the bourgeoisie to complete its task of transforming the economy. The incomplete development of this century has produced probably the most profoundly fragmented and disintegrated societies in the world. The economic failure of the bourgeoisie allows the most advanced modes of production to co-exist with the most primitive. The exploited classes, who together constitute the vast majority of the population, are segregated into divided minorities.[21] A serf-like peasantry is imprisoned within feudal relationships. Semi-employed agricultural workers are exploited by a plantation economy. An urban proletariat works modern capitalist industry. A white-collar force precariously depends on a corrupt and over-staffed State apparatus. A mass of unemployed, sub-proletarians, petty parasites and lazzaroni stagnate in swarming bidonvilles. Ethnic differences—Pre-Columbian American, European, African, Asian —add vertical divisions. This complex fragmentation is undoubtedly the greatest single barrier to revolution in Latin America today.

However, as against this, the ramshackle social order is mined both in town and country. The ubiquitous influx of foreign capital creates an important proletariat without producing an enlarged countervailing bourgeoisie—and the growth of industrial employment and urbanization in turn leads to the creation of large numbers of unemployed on the edge of the towns. At the same time the rural areas, despite the backwardness and oppression which reign in them, are also strikingly vulnerable. Both Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires were more successful at establishing towns and cities than at effectively colonizing the rural interiors. The imposed feudalism of Latin America always remained to some extent inorganic, bureaucratic and city based. The intimate bond between feudal lord and serf was never effectively recreated in the New World. The landowner, even when he lived on his land, never wholly acquired feudal authority over the serf population of Indians and escaped or freed slaves. Only in those countries where the population is almost wholly European (e.g. Argentina and Uruguay) has a stable rural order been established. Elsewhere the “backlands”, “interior”, and “Sierra” have been a constant source of revolts; even guajiros of Spanish origin become “Indian”.

In Cuba, these epicentres in the social order were present in an extreme form. The weakness of Cuban rural society was particularly acute. Lowry Nelson noted a striking absence of social institutions (schools, churches, etc.), a high rate of geographical mobility among all groups, and a lack of “name-consciousness”— even large villages often possessed no name. Officially rural illiteracy was 40%, but it was in fact much higher. According to the 1943 census over half of the permanently co-habiting couples in rural Oriente Province were unmarried. Nelson’s questionnaires reveal that the rural population felt itself to be on alien territory: the first demand was for improved communications, the second for educational facilities. An outbreak of socialist jacqueries in the countryside in August-September, 1933, revealed the potentially elemental forces which could be unleashed in the Cuban countryside. Sugar workers took over thirty-three mills establishing what they called soviets. The army immediately attempted to suppress these rural soviets, but many fought on bitterly for months.

At the same time the existence of 700,000 permanently unemployed or under-employed in both town and countryside constituted an immense breach in the whole society. This mass was not even exploited in the relationships of production: it was simply excluded from them altogether. It had no stake or foothold in the social order at all. No more radical destitution and expulsion can be imagined. In the case of both the rural workforce and this vast interzonal flotsam, one crucial fact is clear: there was an almost complete lack of any social or ideological integration of these groups into the normative structure of society. No such thing as an “inclusive” or “parent” society existed.