Cuban Revolution

CUBAN REVOLUTION. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959 coincided with a thaw in the Cold War, the beginnings of a political stirring in the student population, and receding influence of McCarthyism in US politics. Fidel Castro became an instant hero in the United States as the romantic guerrilla chief who had led the fight against Fulgencio Batista, a universally hated dictator (except by the Central Intelligence Agency and the US State Department). The Old and the nascent New Left found the Cuban leader appealing. Castro seemed to epitomize popular democracy and economic and social justice without the ideological baggage of Marxism-Leninism. He also believed that Cuba could not be independent unless it controlled its own economy, an idea American leaders refuted. Fidel Castro’s ideological commitment, before and after he became a Communist, had been designed to bring the Cuban people into the course of history denied to them first by Spanish and then by US domination.

The Cuban peoples’ first step toward real nationhood excited the Left. Thousands of students who returned from Cuba joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPFC) or the Student Fair Play Committee. During 1960, FPFC spearheaded the “Hands Off Cuba” campaign. Writers such as James Baldwin, C. Wright Mills, and Jean-Paul Sartre, all of whom had visited Cuba, gave prestige to the organization.

By mid-1960, most of the US mass media reflected an increasingly hostile government line. American officials had been upset by Castro’s first moves, including his slashing of rents, his taking over the public utilities, and the beginning an anti-Yankee campaign. This sentiment translated into a campaign of public opposition when in March 1959 Cuban revolutionary tribunals ordered the execution of hundreds of Batista officials. On 3 January 1961, days before the inauguration of a new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and closed the US Embassy in Havana.
The Cuban Revolution also coincided with the birth of the New Left in the United States and energized many of its emerging leaders. For the first year and a half the Cuban Revolution delighted anarchists and Trotskyists alike. As soon as the Soviet Union made clear its intention to provide Cuba with basic economic and military aid, Communists also joined the pro-Castro front.

By summer 1960, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, the editors of Monthly Review, had correctly diagnosed the Cuban Revolution’s character: socialist. By the fall 1960, Ballantine Books had published both C. Wright Mills’s Listen, Yankee!, which characterized Fidel and the revolution as democratic, populist, and quintessentially just, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sartre on Cuba.

As pressure from the US government increased, more than a half-million Cuban expatriates, many from privileged positions, poured into the United States to join an already well-established anticommunist movement. The Fair Play Committee soon became faction-ridden and subjected to enormous pressure from federal police and anti-Castro groups. Both oddballs and agents soon joined or formed Fair Play chapters. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald, unknown by any of the national officers, opened a Fair Play office in New Orleans. Oswald later became notorious as the alleged lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963.

US hostility toward Cuba showed itself in programs of covert sabotage and terrorism, which, Cuban authorities claim, killed more than 3,000 islanders. What became a decades-long trade embargo, lasting well into the twenty-first century, began in 1962. The trade restrictions were designed to implement an official but not publicly shared policy “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government” in Cuba. These sanctions grew into an extra-territorial economic blockade by the Toricelli (1992) and Helms-Burton (1996) acts, broadly interfering with trade and financing by third countries with Cuba.

One additional factor played into the hostility of the State Department and CIA to Cuba: race. From the early 1960s onward, Cuba’s revolutionary practice had a special appeal to Black radical organizations and individuals. Members and leaders of the Black Panther Party, the All African People’s Revolutionary Party, and the Nation of Islam expressed a kinship. Castro’s decision to stay in Harlem during his official visit to the United Nations, a meeting between Fidel Castro and Malcolm X, and its later, high risk role in successfully fighting against South African apartheid troops in Angola all highlighted these activities. Cuba’s steadfastly providing asylum to political refugee Assata Shakur in the face of US demands for his return continued to inspire people of multiple generations and not only people of color.

The existence only ninety miles from US soil of a popular third world revolution that evolved into socialism under a charismatic leader and a Communist Party made travel a major political issue. Since the 1960s, members of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) defended the right of US nationals to visit Cuba and represented Cubans seeking to visit and speak in the United States. The allied Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) with the NLG Cuba Subcommittee represented or assisted more than 300 US travelers to Cuba who were formally investigated and more than a dozen brought to “trials for travel” under President George W. Bush. The Venceremos Brigade, a solidarity project of US activists determined to defy the US travel ban to establish people-to-people contact with Cubans, successfully engaged some 10,000 participants from 1969 to 2019. The brigade combined work projects with lectures and tours of the island and encouraged many activists to advance into a broad array of support movements.

Pastors for Peace, a project of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), combined upfront civil disobedience with a religious commitment to bring humanitarian and material aid to Cuba in thirty yearly caravans, each one holding scores of public programs since 1988. Founded by a Black Baptist minister, Rev. Lucius Walker, IFCO/PFP challenged US policy by refusing to apply for a US “license” to either travel or bring donated goods. Rev. Walker became probably the best known US activist in Cuba. Tom Hayden, a leading figure in the New Left and thereafter in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, was highly placed among other prominent American radicals unfailingly supportive of the Cuban Revolution.

IFCO also led delegations to Cuba for the US Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Working with both Cuba and the CBC, the IFCO served as a conduit for Cuba’s standing offer since 2000 to provide free medical school education to select US students of color and others, in return for their commitment to return to the US and work in a medically underserved communities. The Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC) supported US students and graduates from ELAM, held conferences, and published a journal on Cuban medical developments.

Terrorism by US-based anti-Cuba civilians directed at people in Cuba, as well as perceived sympathizers in the United States, was highlighted in the case of the Cuban Five. These Cuban operatives came to Florida to monitor violent plots directed at Cuban civilians by various expatriates. Despite Cuban efforts to cooperate with the FBI to prevent terrorist acts, the Five were instead arrested in Florida in 1998 and tried on conspiracy charges, resulting in long sentences and a major international campaign. They were released in 2015 as part of agreements between Presidents Obama and Raul Castro to restore diplomatic recognition. The US-based National Committee to Free the Cuban Five led this campaign with many other legal and solidarity groups, stirring more enthusiasm for the Cuban cause.

Committee on Internal Security, U.S. House of Representatives, 92nd Congress, October 16, 18 & 19, 1972. The Theory and Practice of Communism in 1972 (Venceremos Brigade), Part 2.

Franklin, Jane. Cuba and the United States: A Chronological History. Melbourne & New York: Ocean Press, 1997.

Kimber, Stephen. What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2013.

Latner, Teishan. Cuban Revolution in America - Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

LeoGrande, William M. and Kornbluh, Peter. Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Venceremos Brigade Website. https://vb4cuba.com