Prologue to the Cuban Revolution pt. IV

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

In the towns, the Cuban working-class had a history which was significant in a quite different way. The countryside, the semi-employed and the unemployed existed outside any regulating ideological or political universe at all. The urban working-class, on the contrary, was for most of its history integrated into the most highly structured ideological organization in Cuba—the Communist Party. Two facts are enough to show how important the historical role Communist Party was Cuban society. The Cuban C.P. was in relative terms the most successful Communist Party in Latin America. In Cuba it was the only durable political party produced by the pre-revolutionary Republic. It was a serious social and political force uninterruptedly from its foundation in 1925 to the fall of Batista in 1959. No other Cuban political party could match this record.

The Cuban Communist Party, then called the Partido Communista de Cuba, had for its first general secretary the student leader, Julio Mella, later murdered in Mexico by Machado’s agents. During the 1933 revolution the party, led by its current general secretary, the poet Ruben Martinez Villena, pursued a left line aimed at radicalizing the student-sergeant coalition. However, the party’s organizational capacities at this date proved too weak for this tactic to succeed. Trade unions had existed in Cuba since the late nineteenth century; their leadership at first tended to be anarcho-syndicalist though by the early 1930s the Communist Party dominated the most important national trade union federation. But at this time the unions were still comparatively weak. Thus, the party had a certain influence among the sugar workers, but it was unable to co-ordinate the seizure of mills and the formation of rural soviets in 1933. As the Sugar Workers’ Union Conference later commented: “Organization in general trailed behind the evolution of the struggle as it developed from day to day—the seizure of the sugar mills, the attempted creation of soviets, the arming of the proletariat.”[1] In 1935, at the fourth plenum of the Central Committee of the P.C.C., the policy of the Popular Front was adopted, in line with the general change of policy within the Communist movement after the seventh congress of the Third International. Henceforth the party devoted all its energies to union organization. The new general secretary who succeeded Villena after his death in 1934 was Blas Roca (Francisco Calderio), a militant of the shoemakers’ union. The irreproachably impartial I.B.R.D. Report on Cuba later commented: “From 1933 to 1947 the Communists by superior industriousness, devotion, training and tactical skill—all of which qualities their bitterest critics emphasize—succeeded in attaining practically complete control of the Cuban labour movement.”[2] After 1937 the unions, as has been seen, were able under Batista to win important gains for the working-class. This naturally attracted support for the party. In 1939 it was legalized under the name Union Revolucionaria Communista and 80,000 people attended a celebration meeting in Havana. In 1942 a coalition with Batista was marked by the presence of two Communists in his cabinet (Cuba had declared war on Germany, though she was not involved in the fighting). In the elections of 1944, the party backed Batista’s candidate under its new name Partido Socialista Popular (P.S.P.). Its membership, registered with the Electoral Tribunal, was 122,000, of whom about 15,000 were cadres. The party had deservedly become the only mass party of the Cuban working class. After 1947 its strength declined as the Autentico government systematically purged the unions and persecuted the party; prominent Communist unionists, like Jesus Menendez (secretary-general of the sugar workers’ union) were shot to death by Autentico gangsters. However, it was too strongly rooted in working-class traditions to be eliminated. The 1950 elections revealed continuing support for the P.S.P. as it received in Havana only 10,000 votes less than the Government co-alition.

However, the stamina and success of the party was bought at a price. The P.S.P. identified itself with only the economistaims of the working-class. This incapacitated it for revolutionary leadership. It was unable either to build the necessary alliance of revolutionary forces or to formulate the requisite revolutionary strategy. Batista’s coup of 1952 was greeted with a call for honest elections, and this policy was maintained until the summer of 1958 when the party rallied to the Rebels.

Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that the Communist Party in January 1959, represented a major and lasting force in Cuban society, which no revolutionary regime could ignore or easily displace. The I.B.R.D. report paid it its truest tribute: “It must be remembered that nearly all the popular education of working people on how an economic system worked and what might be done to improve it came first from the anarcho-syndicalists, and most recently—and most effectively—from the Communists.”[3]

These then were the major forces of the poor and exploited in Cuba: an abandoned rural population, a destitute mass of unemployed, and a relatively compact and disciplined urban proletariat. The revolutionary potential of each was incapsulated in diametrically opposite forms: non-integration into any ideological or organizational structure, integration into an extremely militant and articulated structure.

Finally, some comment is also needed on the inarticulate and inchoate forms of consciousness which were to be found among the Cuban poor. In the first place, what may be called the African tradition is extremely important. Very little can be understood about Cuba until it is realized how ethnically African a country it is. Some 25% of the population is of more or less pure African descent and the number of mulattos is very considerable: census figures are not an accurate guide to how many. The overwhelming majority of Afro-Cubans have been in manual occupations, particularly in the rural labour force. These descendants of the Cuban slave population have retained strong elements of an African identity. Caribbean and Brazilian (in contrast to North American) slaves went mainly to large plantations; despite the unbelievably cruel conditions on these plantations the slaves were able to preserve a certain collective consciousness and continuity of identity.[4] Thus African religious ideas are clearly dominant in the Haitian Voodoo and the Cuban nanigo cults, whereas negro religious movements in the United States have until recently been almost purely Christian; Afro-Cuban music and dance forms are much closer to African originals than are North American variants.

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The political expression of this African identity was a tradition of continuous insurrection and rebellion which lasted to the early decades of the century. The first slave revolts in the continent occurred in Cuba in 1525, only thirteen years after the resistance of the Indian leader Hatuey had been crushed. In the nineteenth century there were many revolts and conspiracies, usually involving several thousand slaves and originating in Oriente—notably in 1812, 1827, 1843 and 1879. Afro-Cubans played an important part in the Independence wars—the very name given the Independence fighters, mambíses, was of African origin. The last Afro-Cuban uprising in 1912, led by Evaristo Estenoz, was only suppressed after U.S. marines had intervened and 3,000 Afro-Cubans lost their lives. After 1912, the African political tradition merged into the general currents of Cuban radicalism. In particular, the Communist Party was always distinguished by its large number of Afro-Cuban leaders. The famous Realengo 18 Rural Soviet, which held out against Batista’s armies right into the early months of 1934, was led by an Afro-Cuban Communist, Leon Alvarez. Jesus Menendez, whose murder was one of the most notorious episodes in the Grau Government, was an AfroCuban. Today such prominent members of the former P.S.P. as Blas Roca (editor of Hoy), Lazaro Pena (Secretary-General of the C.T.C.), Severo Aguirre (I.N.R.A.), and Carlos Olivares (Ambassador to Moscow) are all of partly African origin. At the same time, the associations and traditions of the Africans in Cuba have been present in the Fidelista Revolution almost from the start. Raul’s column in the Sierra Maestra was affectionately known as the “Mau-Mau”. A typical post-revolutionary illustration of this tradition is provided by a recent speech of Fidel’s at a meeting in Oriente, ethnically the most African of Cuba’s provinces: “In the past when voices were raised in favour of liberation for the slaves, the bourgeoisie would say ‘impossible, it will ruin the country’; and to instil fear they spoke of the ‘black terror’. Today they speak of the ‘red terror’. In other words: in their fight against liberty, they spread fear of the negro: today they are spreading fear of socialism and communism.”[5]

A second current of radical consciousness among the Cuban poor was provided by popular Christianity. It has already been explained how the Church was unable to play its normal reactionary institutional role in Cuba. In this vacuum, there became prevalent what Gerald Brennan has called the “heresy” that consists in “taking very literally the very frequent allusions in the Scriptures to the wickedness and consequent damnation of the rich and the blessedness of the poor”.[6] Perhaps the Cuban worker or peasant read the words of the Virgin Mary with the same reaction as the Spanish worker: “In her great song of triumph, charged with an unmistakeable prophetic meaning, she had rejoiced that the mighty had been put down from their seats, and the poor exalted, that the hungry had been filled with good things whilst the rich had been sent empty away. He (the worker) might be forgiven for seeing in such words an expression of class feeling!”[7] In this form Christianity provided a moral critique of the venality and oppression of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Today a revolutionary slogan reads “He who is against the poor is against Christ”. The three bearded wise men in the small wayside Christmas crib sometimes look uncannily like Karl Marx and Fidel Castro. Pictures of Christ and Fidel side by side in a Cuban home are very common. Spanish priests have been expelled and “heresy” reigns undisputed. It is noteworthy that today relations between the Holy See and the Revolutionary Government of Cuba are cordial.

A final pervasive form of consciousness in Cuba was, of course, nationalism. Because Cuba’s independence was late and incomplete, it was an “advanced” nationalism from the beginning. The hero of the Second Independence War, José Marti, was able in the perspective of the 1890s to be the most radical of all the great Latin American liberators. He saw with anguish that Cuban independence, which was costing Cubans such immense losses in the war against Spain, might be confiscated from them by the nascent imperialism of the United States. The social content of Marti’s anti-imperialism appeared at first to be classically petit bourgeois. But as a leader of the Cuban liberation movement, he discovered that in the Cuban conditions of his time: “The people —the oppressed masses—are the real leaders of revolutions.” He saw his task as “uniting all the real forces of labour against those who strangle freedom with their corruption, their plunder, and their luxury.” His last words called on Cubans to “halt the spread of the United States over the West Indies, after which it will with added force descend on our lands of America” and urged them to prevent “the opening in Cuba, though its annexation by the imperialists, of the road that must be barred, and which we are barring with our blood, of the annexation of all the nations of our America by the violent and brutal North that despises us.” When the Republic was finally established, it became clear that Cuba, which had perhaps fought hardest against Spain, had acquired the least independence. Systematic subjection—economic, political, cultural—to the United States ensured that Cuban nationalism retained and developed the radical character that Marti gave to it. Because the Cuban bourgeoisie was structurally integrated into the neo-colonial economic regime, nationalism became a force directed against the whole social order, not merely the imperialist power. The continuity of Cuban nationalism receives material expression in the Second Declaration of Havana which opens, seventy years afterwards, with Marti’s dying words.

These, then, were the mass forces and the collective consciousness which awaited the arrival of the Rebel Army in Havana. It was their immense driving-power which turned the insurrection of a tiny minority into a tumultuous total revolution. How were their energies released? How did the rebel leadership succeed in mobilizing the exploited classes of Cuba?

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Three decisive factors may briefly explain how the revolutionary elite of 1956–1958 became the mass revolutionary force of 1959–1963. The first two reveal the extreme importance of the relatively developed character of the Cuban economy as compared with that of Russia in 1917 or China in 1949. First and most obviously, the communications network in Cuba—transport, tele-communications, and newsprint—was very highly developed; in some sectors, it had effectively reached saturation point. This sophisticated system of communication provided the indispensable technical preconditions for the astonishing mobilization of 1959–60.[8] The absence of a political party was compensated by a television; radio and transport system which allowed immediate, electric contact between the revolutionary leadership and the working people of Cuba. In the critical early days of the Rebel regime, the importance of this physical substitute for a political organization can scarcely be overestimated.

Secondly, the crucial economic conditions of mobilization were provided by the sheer, maldistributed wealth of the Cuban economy. A radical Agrarian Reform, a 50% reduction in urban rents, a massive housing and schools construction programme, a wave of 25%–30% wage-increases—these measures brought almost unbelievably rapid and visible benefits to Cuba’s disinherited classes. Agricultural production rose considerably. There was a great increase in the output of cheap textiles, clothes, shoes, cigarettes and beer, and a corresponding decline in luxury consumption. Altogether the sum effect of these measures was to transfer 15% of the National Income from property-owners to wageworkers within the space of about a year.[9] A redistribution of this kind is historically unprecedented. No revolution before has ever been made in a country rich enough to permit such a transfer. The demonstration effect of it must have been overwhelming.

Thirdly, the political condition of the united élan of 1959–60 was the quality of the revolution’s leadership. The tactical skill, dramatic flair and political vision of Fidel, Raul and Che was of the highest order. The Revolution was unchallengeable consolidated in its first two years, before serious economic difficulties and political threats materialized. From 1961 onwards, North American fury had been aroused by the expropriations of the previous summer, and the blockade, flight of technicians and drop in investment had produced the first food shortages. But by the time the Cuban bourgeoisie began its exodus to Florida and the United States government decided to destroy the Revolution, it was too late. The Revolution rested unshakeably on the enthusiastic, armed participation of the majority of the Cuban people.

A final remark should be made. The fusion of the rebel leadership and the broadest mass forces in Cuba sealed the revolution. The problem of revolutionary institutions, however, remained. As has been seen, the special nature of pre-revolutionary Cuban society made the overthrow of Batista possible without a real political organization or ideology. In a different way, the special nature of Cuban society allowed the creation and consolidation of a mass Revolution in an unprecedentedly short period of time, still without a political organization or ideology. But thereafter, in the long-term task of socialist accumulation, and the mortal struggle with the United States, both were inevitably needed. The Cuban Road to Communism was open. Today, when Cuba has crossed the threshold into a plural Communist world, the tension between the distinctive values of the “uninstitutionalized” character of its Revolution, and the imperative needs of its new economy and society, continues. It is hoped to examine these in a later study.

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