This debate intends to explore what we have so far learned about the Cuban approach to socialism and development through an analysis of its contradictions.

11 Between the Old and the New

I The end of the Batista regime came amidst a revolutionary general strike on Jan- uary 1, 1959, summoning hundreds of thousands of Cubans to a final offensive against the old order, demanding nothing less than unconditional surrender to the new. But it was not immediately apparent that the resulting transition of power signified anything more than a turnover of personnel. The new provi- sional revolutionary government was unremarkable enough: a loose coalition made up of representatives of the established political parties, largely from the ranks of the Auténticos and Ortodoxos, mostly men from liberal professions who either in person or in kind had long governed Cuba.

But it was also increasingly clear that authority in Cuba after January 1959 did not come from the new provisional revolutionary government or the old political parties, but originated in the 26 of July Movement, in its armed forces, and most of all in its leader, Fidel Castro. And herein lay the difference between what was new in this transition and what was old. The movement was led by a new generation—the “generation of the centenario,” they called themselves: on the centennial of José Martí’s birth (1853), Moncada was attacked (1953). For a new movement to proclaim itself charged with a mission of deliverance was not an unfamiliar phenomenon in Cuba. This was not the first time that youth had aspired to power in the name of the people, justice, and freedom and stepped forward to claim responsibility for redemption. The leader of the new genera- tion was different, however. To be sure, he, like others before him, aspired to the role of redeemer, in behalf of the people and, of course, in the name of jus- tice and liberty. But he also invoked history. It was to history that Fidel Castro appealed for absolution during his trial in 1953. It was from history that he sought the mandate and sanction for revolution—a self-conscious effort to rep- resent this new generation and this new movement as the fulfillment of unmet aspirations and unkept promises of the past.

Revolutionaries were conscious of their role as liberators, and they played the part with alacrity. They declined to shed the trappings of armed struggle, so that to be revolutionary was often as much a function of one’s appearance as it was of one’s politics. Beards, long hair, and olive fatigues assumed powerful sym- bolic value, another way of distinguishing the new from the old, another way of saying that the struggle for redemption was not yet over.

From the outset the 26 of July Movement contained elements that defined the purpose of armed struggle less in terms of destroying the old order and more

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in terms of creating a new one. These tendencies were politically inchoate and programmatically incomplete. But if this ambiguity was a cause of potential weakness, it was also the source of actual strength, for it permitted improvisa- tion in response to rapidly changing circumstances. The success of Cuban arms carried the island over a threshold never before crossed. Not since the nine- teenth century had Cubans employed arms with such effect, and never before had the effects of Cuban arms been so complete. They had challenged a repres- sive regime on its own terms, and succeeded—unconditionally and unassisted. The armed struggle announced the rise of a generation that owed its success to its own resources and resolve. An unpopular government was displaced, its political allies discredited, and its armed forces defeated.

But it was not clear that the traditional political opposition to the fallen regime, principally in the form of the Auténticos and Ortodoxos, stood to ben- efit from this triumph. Certainly, they had contributed to the fall of Batista, and in some instances at great sacrifice. In a larger sense, however, they also had con- tributed to the rise of Batista. Their years in power during the 1940s and early 1950s had ended in disgrace, and their years in opposition could not erase the memory of their years in office. In some fashion or other almost all political leaders after 1933, of all political parties, were implicated in misgovernment and malfeasance. Thus, an indictment of the accumulated ills of Cuban society was no less an indictment of past politicians in the aggregate, irrespective of their part in the struggle against the Batista government. And there was more, for the principal institutions of the republic, by virtue of association, had also failed and fallen into discredit: the presidency, congress, the courts, the army and police, the old political parties, the press, the church.

The new provisional government, a mix of mostly liberals and some revo- lutionaries, understood the implications of these conditions, and took immedi- ate steps to make a substantive and symbolic break with past politics. The Batista congress was dissolved. Property owned by batistianos was confiscated, their safe deposit boxes seized, and their bank accounts frozen. The old political parties were abolished. All candidates who participated in the elections of 1954 and 1958 were proscribed from all future political activity.

II Distinctions between the past and the present were drawn without difficulty, with almost celebratory unanimity. In 1959, Fidel Castro stood at the head of a movement of enormous popularity. Much of this was derived from his personal appeal. A gifted orator and charismatic personality, Castro emerged as a leader virtually without rival. He displayed almost unlimited energy, delivering spell- binding speeches hours in length, daily it seemed. Making full use of an exten- sive radio and television system, addressing mass rallies often numbering in the hundreds of thousands of people, Fidel Castro was a ubiquitous presence through the early months of 1959. He exhorted his followers and excoriated his foes; he explained his policies and expounded on his philosophies. He appealed

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directly to the Cuban people, raising revolutionary morale and summoning Cubans to heroic action.

However great the part played by Fidel Castro in the triumph and consoli- dation of the revolution during the early years, it was also apparent that the source of his appeal and the success of his authority were in a larger sense a func- tion of conditions both historic and actual. Social structures were in disarray, the political system was in crisis, the economy was in distress. National institutions were in varying degrees of disintegration and disrepute, and because they had not served Cubans well, if at all, they were vulnerable. By attacking the past that had created these hardships, the revolutionary leadership struck a responsive chord that initially cut across lines of class and race and served to unite Cubans of almost all political persuasions. It aroused extraordinary enthusiasm for “la revolución,” and as ambiguously defined as it was, it could mean all things to all people. Aroused too was a powerful surge of nationalism, one summoned by the revolution and soon indistinguishable from it.

Revolutionary leaders reached ascendency in spectacular fashion, and en route were endowed with proportions larger than life. Already in 1959 the lead- ers of the revolution had become the stuff of legends and lore, the subject of books and songs, of poems and film. Revolutionaries were celebrities, folk heroes, and the hope of the hopeful. There was, during the early months, no creditable opposition, and what opposition did exist was either out of the coun- try or out of favor, or both.

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Fidel Castro, 1961. (Pedro Alvarez Tabío, ed., Cien imagenes de la revolución cubana, 1953–1996. Havana, 1996)

But power of this magnitude, confined on this scale to the leadership of one revolutionary organization, did not long stay unchallenged. Those appointed to the provisional government believed themselves endowed with the authority to rule, and when they sought to exercise that authority, they clashed directly with the shadow authority of Fidel Castro. In early 1959, Prime Minister José Miró Cardona protested and resigned. Fidel Castro was his replacement. Some months later, President Manuel Urrutia resigned, and no longer was there any doubt about where real authority rested. Through 1959, moderates and liberals found themselves increasingly isolated, alienated and ultimately pushed aside by forces they could not comprehend, much less control. In part, the conflict was one of a clash of approaches. Liberals and moderates were appalled by what appeared to them as a flagrant disregard for due process, the fashion in which Fidel Castro and his supporters spurned legal forms and juridical procedures. When forty-four Batista air force pilots were acquitted on charges of bombing civilian centers, widespread popular indignation prompted Castro to denounce the verdict and demand a new trial. In a second trial the pilots were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Liberals and moderates were exasperated, and had growing doubts and suspicions about the intentions of the fidelistas. Those who defended law and legal form conflicted with those who demanded immediate justice. Liberals expected the state to uphold the rule of law and defend individual rights and private ownership. Castro insisted that the state dis- pense justice and defend the collective over the individual, the public over the private. Fidel found sanction in the moral imperatives of the revolution. “Rev- olutionary justice,” Castro insisted on the occasion of the pilots’ acquittal, “is based not on legal precepts, but on moral conviction.”

But the source of the dispute was deeper than a disagreement over means. It was also about ends. Already in early 1959, Fidel Castro, among others in the 26 of July, spoke increasingly of the revolution as a “proceso”—a historical process that was underway, inalterable, and invincible. From the outset these metaphors were an essential part of the ideological baggage the fidelistas carried into Havana. They were in part historic—revolution as continuity with 1895 and 1933. These concerns had been addressed in the speech and in its expanded, published form, “History Will Absolve Me.” Again and again, during the revolutionary war, promises of the new Cuba—of social justice, economic security, political free- dom—were made. And the promises did not end with the victory. On the con- trary, they increased, if only because it was easy—perhaps necessary—to be rev- olutionary in early 1959. The language of revolution filled the airwaves and the news columns—moderates, liberals, and radicals alike dipped freely, and fre- quently, into the wellspring of revolutionary rhetoric. Revolution was in the air, and the atmosphere was rarified indeed. It was intoxicating and seemed to thrive on its own excesses. This was redemption by revolution, and conversions pro- ceeded apace. Under the circumstance, it could hardly be otherwise.

The problem with these developments was that many of the political leaders who invoked the language of revolution were, in fact, either ill-prepared to be

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revolutionaries or ill-disposed toward the revolutionaries. This did not deter them from playing the part, however, or assuming supporting roles, so that they too contributed to creating an atmosphere that was at once revolutionary and could be calmed only by more revolution. The rhetoric of revolution awakened the imagination of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, creating a vast constituency for radical change. It raised expectations of revolution, and not since 1933 had Cuban hopes for change reached such levels. Pressure for immediate, deep, sweeping change was building from below and the invocation of revolution encouraged it to rise to the top. Organized labor mobilized to press demands on a wide variety of issues. The Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) demanded outright a flat 20 percent wage increase for all workers. Strikes increased in number and frequency. Six thousand workers of the Cuban Electric Company staged a slow-down strike to dramatize their demands for a wage increase. Unemployed electrical workers demonstrated at the presidential palace. Unemployed railway workers proclaimed a hunger strike, as did former employ- ees of a Havana paper mill. Construction workers called a wildcat strike at the Moa Bay Mining Company. Restaurant workers threatened to strike. Cane cut- ters marched. Labor protests disrupted sugar production in twenty-one mills.

The pressure for dramatic action mounted. It originated from the sectors of the population most immediately mobilized, with the most to gain: an urban proletariat numbering approximately 500,000; a rural proletariat almost 600,000 strong; a peasantry numbering 220,000; and the vast legions of the unem- ployed/underemployed, who by the end of 1958 numbered as many as 665,000 men and women. This constituency for change made up almost 70 percent of the total labor force, a marginalized population of nearly 2 million people out of an employable labor force of 2.7 million.

This was the social landscape confronting the new government. The revo- lution had the masses as its foundations, new populists as its leaders, and a charis- matic authority as jefe máximo. A mobilized population, hundreds of thousands of people, demanded redress and relief at a speed and scope that could not be reasonably accommodated within the ideological framework and legal struc- tures the liberal provisional government sought to preserve. The situation was not unlike that of 1933, when the provisional government of Ramón Grau San Martín, confronted with mounting pressure for radical change, had balked and collapsed. That marginalized groups would experience a rise in expectations after 1959 was not at all surprising. The revolution, they were given to under- stand, was made in their behalf, for their interests. This revolution was for all Cubans who suffered, Fidel Castro proclaimed as early as 1953, and repeated with regularity thereafter: for the unemployed “who desire to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate in search of livelihood”; for rural workers who inhabited “miserable shacks, who work four months of the year and starve for the rest of the year”; for industrial workers “whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are wretched quarters”; for peasants who “live and die working on land that is

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not theirs.” And to the young men and women of the beleaguered middle class, Fidel invoked a familiar and recurring theme—he promised employment for the “ten thousand young professionals . . . who come forth from school with their degrees, anxious to work and full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end with all doors closed, and where no ear hears their clamor or supplication.”

Vast numbers of Cubans projected their aspirations for social and economic change onto the one person they believed was endowed with unlimited power. Fidel had vast opportunities for manipulation, and indeed there was no small amount of circumlocution during the early months of the revolution. However, while he channeled popular hopes for change, he did not create them. Having once raised hopes for dramatic and substantive change, he could not risk alien- ating his source of power, which by the end of 1959 was also the principal source of the support for the revolution.

Fidel became the object of popular importuning, both cause and effect of a style of personalismo that fostered direct dialogue between the leader and his fol- lowers. He listened to grievances, received petitions, considered complaints. Fidel’s effectiveness increased in direct proportion to rising popular confidence in it. As the belief took hold that Fidel could provide redress, immediately and easily, so too did his ability to do so. At every turn individuals and groups urged him to intervene on behalf of one demand or another. Fidel played the part deftly, and in so doing all but undercut the authority of the provisional govern- ment by depriving it of popular sanction. Fidel was becoming the government. More and more he responded directly to popular calls for action. It was a sym- biotic relationship of enormous vitality. Fidel propounded the goals of the rev- olution, the people demanded deeds of the revolution. This interplay gathered momentum, and soon assumed a logic of its own. There was much spontaneity in all this—improvisation from an exhilarated Fidel and impatience from an aroused population. These forces converged in powerful combination during the heady months of 1959, with predictable if not inevitable results. Fidel became the point of first appeal and the place of last resort.

These convictions appeared confirmed almost immediately when Fidel Cas- tro joined the government as prime minister. Reform decrees provided imme- diate material relief to vast numbers of people. In March, the government enacted the first Urban Reform Law. One of the more popular early reform decrees, the law sought to discourage investments in real estate and construction of private dwellings, to which a considerable portion of national savings had been devoted. The law decreed a 50 percent reduction of rents under $100 monthly, 40 percent reduction of rents between $100 and $200, and 30 percent reduction in rents over $200. The newly established National Savings and Housing Institute (INAV) acquired vacant lots upon which it pledged to construct inexpensive public housing.

Other measures soon followed. In the first nine months of 1959, an esti- mated 1,500 decrees, laws, and edicts were enacted. The government inter- vened in the telephone company and reduced its rates. Electricity rates were cut

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drastically.Virtually all labor contracts were renegotiated and wages raised. Cane cutters’ wages were increased by a flat 15 percent. Health reforms, educational reforms, and unemployment relief followed in quick order. Property owned by all past government officials, senior army officers, mayors and governors, and members of both houses of congress during 1954–58 was seized. The govern- ment restricted the importation of more than two hundred luxury items through higher sales taxes and special licensing requirements. It was a symbolic gesture, certainly, but also substantive, for in one year, Cuba saved as much as $70 million in foreign exchange. Television imports decreased from $3 million to $150,000. Automobile imports fell from $25 million in 1958 to $3.4 million in 1960. Few new Cadillacs were entering Havana.

By far the most sweeping measure enacted in the first year was the Agrarian Reform Law of May 1959. By the terms of the new law, all real estate holdings were restricted in size to 1,000 acres, with the exception of land engaged in the production of sugar, rice, and livestock, where maximum limits were fixed at 3,333 acres. Land exceeding these limits was nationalized, with compensation provided in the form of twenty-year bonds bearing an annual interest rate of 4.5 percent. Payments would be based on the assessed value of land used for tax pur- poses. Expropriated lands were to be reorganized into state cooperatives or dis- tributed into individual holdings of sixty-seven acres, with squatters, sharecrop- pers, and renters receiving first claim to the land which they were working. The law also created the Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) designed initially to supervise the reorganization of land systems and the transfer of land. In fact, the role of INRA expanded rapidly through 1959, and soon came to include respon- sibility for most programs in rural Cuba, including road construction, health facilities, credit enterprises, educational projects, and housing programs.

III These were euphoric times in Cuba. Expectations ran high, were met, and then raised higher again. Cuba had become an aroused nation. Everywhere and, it seemed, continually, Cubans were marching in protest, meeting in mass rallies, dramatizing demands in public demonstrations. And somehow, Fidel seemed always in the thick of it.

The early reform measures won the revolutionary government widespread popular support, instantly. Workers, peasants, the unemployed received benefits that were immediate and direct. Labor received wage increases, the unemployed received jobs. The urban proletariat received rent and utility rate reductions. Peasants received land and credit. That Afro-Cubans made up a disproportion- ate share of the uneducated, unskilled, and unemployed meant that they were among the principal and immediate beneficiaries of the early distributive poli- cies of the revolution. Moreover, in March 1959, the revolutionary government abolished legal discrimination, and scores of hotels, beaches, night clubs, resorts, and restaurants were opened to blacks. The reform measures were dramatic and

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historic, and all provided immediate relief to those sectors of Cuban society that demanded relief immediately. The effects were visible. A significant redistribu- tion of income had taken place. Real wages increased approximately 15 percent through a corresponding decline in the income of landlords and entrepreneurs. In the short space of six months, hundreds of thousands of Cubans developed an immediate and lasting stake in the success of the revolution.

But support was not unanimous. Apprehension and misgivings increased among liberals in and out of government and among property owners in and out of Cuba. Cuba was seen moving toward government by decree and rule by one man. Many were growing increasingly suspicious of the phenomenon of fidelismo, which smacked of demagoguery and over which, they sensed correctly, they could exercise little restraint. Concern increased over the arbitrariness of government. On the matter of national elections, the revolutionary leadership was increasingly vague and noncommital and, on occasion, even hostile, as if mere inquiry into the subject suggested lack of confidence in the direction of the revolution. Elections had originally been scheduled to occur within a year. By March, elections had become more problematical, when Fidel Castro insisted upon the completion of the agrarian reform first, including the elimi- nation of rural illiteracy and the establishment of health facilities in the coun- tryside. “Elections will be held at the appropriate time,” Ernesto Che Guevara promised ambiguously in April 1959; “now the people want revolution first and elections later.” Nor was this rendering entirely a dissimulation. Recalled former President Manuel Urrutia: “The first time I heard the promise of elections repu- diated was when Castro and I attended the opening of the library at Marta Abreu University at Las Villas. At the end of the meeting, Castro mentioned elections and a large number of his listeners shouted against them. After his speech, Castro asked me, ‘Did you notice how they opposed elections?’” By the end of the summer, elections were deferred for two more years, and then pushed back further to some undetermined point in the future.

Discontent increased also among property owners. Large urban landlords denounced the reduction of rents. So did middle-class small property owners, many of whom had invested years of savings into small apartment houses, most of which were mortgaged. Rent reductions threatened these properties, for mortgages were based on higher rental income. Landowners protested the agrarian reform decree. The National Association of Cattle Ranchers freely predicted economic ruin as a result of the limitation on land ownership. The Sugar Mill Owners Association and the Association of Tobacco Planters agreed, and vigorously attacked the Agrarian Reform Law. Implementation of the decree, sugar mill owners warned, threatened to cripple national production. Newspaper editorials and radio commentaries also registered their disapproval. The church moved openly into opposition.

By this time, too, alarm had reached official circles in the United States. In fact, the breach began early in 1959. That so many batistianos had found safe haven in the United States, beyond the reach of the revolutionary tribunals, and

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that some of these ex-officials were already engaged openly in counter- revolutionary activity, aroused no small ire in Havana. The work of the tribunals, in turn, including the execution of former Batista officials, led to diplomatic protests from the United States. Inevitably, too, given the magnitude of North American investments in Cuba, Washington reacted with a mixture of concern and consternation at the enactment of each new revolutionary decree. Interna- tional Telephone and Telegraph protested the reduction of its rates, as did the Cuban Electric Company. The Agrarian Reform Law strained relations even further. North American sugar companies and cattle enterprises denounced the measure as confiscatory. The 3,333-acre limit reduced the Pingree ranch in Ori- ente to one-sixteenth of its size. The King ranch in Camagüey lost nine-tenths of its holdings. By the end of the summer, an estimated 2.5 million acres of ranch land had been nationalized. The State Department expressed its “concern” at the rush of events in Cuba and insisted upon “prompt, adequate, and effective compensation” for all property nationalized by the Cuban government. In late 1959, U.S. officials alluded to the possibility of cutting the Cuban sugar quota in retaliation.

Into this highly charged setting was introduced one more volatile issue. Members of the Cuban communist party, the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), were moving in increasing numbers, into government positions, not high ones but certainly visible ones: in the armed forces, in the administration of INRA, at sub-cabinet levels, and in the provinces and municipalities.

IV A critical threshold was crossed in the autumn of 1959. Despair spread among liberals who were, in any case, already disoriented and on the defensive. The emerging prominence of the PSP did nothing to calm their misgivings. For prop- erty owners in Cuba and the United States, the participation of the PSP in the government confirmed their worst fears. Opposition to government programs, in part spontaneous, in part organized, began to have a sobering effect on Fidel Castro and his closest advisors. Resistance to the agrarian reform program in par- ticular, both within Cuba and from the United States, served to draw sharply the ideological battle lines. Revolutionary leaders stood at a crossroad. “The great landowners,” Ernesto Che Guevara recalled later, “many of them North Amer- icans, immediately sabotaged the law of Agrarian Reform. We were therefore face-to-face with a choice . . . : a situation in which, once embarked, it is diffi- cult to return to shore. But it would have been still more dangerous to recoil since that would have meant the death of the Revolution. . . . The more just and the more dangerous course was to press ahead . . . and what we supposed to have been an agrarian reform with a bourgeois character was transformed into a vio- lent struggle.” The revolution had reached the limits of what it could accomplish through collaboration with liberals and countenance from the United States. To advance further required a fundamental realignment of social forces, no less than

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a reordering of Cuban international relations. For this, Fidel Castro needed the Cuban communist party, an organization of singular discipline and preparation, with historic ties to mass organizations and political connections to the socialist bloc. The PSP, Fidel Castro acknowledged to Herbert Matthews years later, “had men who were truly revolutionary, loyal, honest and trained. I needed them.”

The effects were immediate. To domestic critics Fidel Castro vowed to pro- ceed with full implementation of agrarian reform, adding that opponents to the law were traitors to the revolution. He also rejected out-right North American demands for “prompt” compensation, reiterating the Cuban decision to com- pensate landowners in the form of twenty-year bonds. Personnel turnovers in the government, in part voluntary, in part forced, increased quickly thereafter. Liberals and moderates resigned, or were forced out, their places taken by loyal fidelistas and members of the PSP. The breach deepened, and the pace of liberal resignations and radical replacements quickened. Through 1959 the leadership of trade unions passed under the control of the PSP. At the same time, senior administrative positions in the Ministry of Labor were filled by the PSP. The presence of the PSP in the armed forces also increased. Party members received teaching appointments at various Rebel Army posts in Havana and Las Villas. The appearance of the PSP in the armed forces, in turn, led to wholesale resig- nation and, in some cases, arrest of anti-communist officers. In October Raúl Castro assumed charge of the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (MINFAR), and forthwith launched a thorough reorganization of the military, distributing key commands to only trustworthy officers.

By the end of the year, anti-communism had become synonymous with counter-revolution. By the end of the year, too, opposition took new forms. Sabotage was on the rise. Organized resistance by exiles in the United States increased. These developments, in turn, had far-reaching consequences, for increasingly political opposition was transformed into armed opposition, much of which originated from abroad. Defense of the nation became indistinguish- able from defense of the revolution and, in fact, at once accelerated and facili- tated the centralization of power, curtailment of civil liberties, and elimination of opposition, all in the name of national security. Opposition was portrayed as tantamount to subversion. “To be a traitor to the Revolution is to be a traitor to the country,” Fidel Castro proclaimed in 1960. “The destiny of our sover- eignty is at stake. . . . We have decided that either we are or we are not a free country and we are and want to be a free country.” And if opposition was sub- version, then neutrality was suspect. It was time again in Cuba to choose sides, and no one could remain impartial. “In a revolutionary process,” Fidel Castro announced, “there are no neutrals, there are only partisans of the revolution or enemies of it.” In this climate, opposition newspapers and radio stations, one by one, were seized by the government, or closed down altogether. In early Janu- ary 1960, Avance was closed. Several weeks later El Mundo was seized. In March the government took over the CMQ station, the most important television net- work in Havana. In May, the last of the opposition press, Diario de la Marina and Prensa Libre, were seized. And in increasing numbers, opponents of the regime

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emigrated. Relations with the United States continued to deteriorate. Attacks against Cuba from exiles in the United States prompted denunciations from Havana. In February 1960, a Soviet trade delegation headed by Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan arrived in Havana. This was followed several days later by the visit of an East German trade mission. In late March, Poland signed a trade agreement with Cuba. Several weeks later, Cuba and the Soviet Union resumed diplomatic relations, suspended since 1952.

The guarantee of alternative markets for sugar exports, no less than the promise of economic assistance, undoubtedly strengthened the government’s position against internal opponents and foreign opposition. Cubans were assured at least of the capacity to survive economic warfare with the United States. The North American threat to cut the sugar quota now lost some of its potency. At the same time, these developments also increased the vulnerability of liberals and moderates, for as the influence of the United States waned in Cuba, the U.S. lost the capacity to protect and promote the interests of those social groups who had long been the beneficiaries of its hegemony. On the other hand, the shift increased the importance of PSP, which had direct and institutional contacts with Cuba’s new patron. The commercial agreements with the socialist bloc intro- duced the Soviet Union into the dispute, a development that Cubans were able to exploit with great effect.

Events moved rapidly thereafter, in Cuba as well as in the United States and the Soviet Union. According to the terms of the 1960 economic agreement, the Soviets agreed to purchase 425,000 tons of sugar immediately, and one mil- lion tons in each of the following four years. The Soviet Union offered Cuba $100 million in the form of credits, technical assistance, and crude and refined petroleum. In March 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to proceed with the arming and training of Cuban exiles. In April 1960, the Soviet Union agreed to sell Cuba crude oil at prices considerably lower than those charged by foreign oil companies, thereby pro- viding immediate foreign exchange savings for the island.

The Cuban-Soviet oil agreement had immediate consequences. In May, Cuban authorities ordered Standard Oil, Texaco, and Shell to refine Soviet petroleum. On June 7 the companies refused. Three weeks later Cuba nation- alized foreign refineries. Up to this point, Cuban expropriations had been con- fined principally to sugar and cattle land, within the larger framework of the agrarian reform law. More than one year had lapsed between these two expro- priation decrees. After June 1960, there was no going back. The United States retaliated. On July 5, Eisenhower cut Cuban sugar imports by 700,000 tons, the balance of the quota for 1960. The quota was thereafter fixed at zero.

The Cuban reaction was not long in coming. On August 5 Cuba expropri- ated additional North American properties on the island, including two utilities, 36 sugar mills, and petroleum assets. A month later, the government national- ized the Cuban branches of North American banks. On October 13, the United States responded with an economic embargo on Cuba, a ban of all U.S. exports except medicines and some foodstuff. Cuba reacted the same day, now in almost

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predictable fashion: the nationalization of additional properties. What distin- guished the October 13 expropriations from previous state seizures, however, was that the government nationalized a broad range of private enterprises irrespec- tive of national ownership. For the first time since the confiscation of bastistiano property, the state moved against non-agricultural Cuban-owned interests. A total of 382 private enterprises were expropriated, including sugar mills, rice mills, Cuban-owned banks, railroads, textile factories, distilleries, department stores, and cinemas. A second Urban Reform Law in October prohibited own- ership of more than one residence. Lessees of confiscated property became ten- ants of the state and former owners received compensation at a maximum rate of $350 a month. Later that month, Cuba nationalized another 166 North Amer- ican enterprises, including insurance companies, import firms, hotels, casinos, textile firms, metal plants, tobacco export firms, chemical companies, and food processing plants, all but eliminating U.S. investments in Cuba. In January 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba.

The North American attempt to use economic coercion first to force Fidel Castro into moderation and subsequently to remove him from power failed to achieve the desired results. On the contrary, the internal strength of the gov- ernment increased and its relations with the socialist bloc expanded. On July 9, four days after the United States had suspended the quota, the Soviet Union announced its decision to purchase 700,000 tons of Cuban sugar, the full quan- tity cut by the United States. This was followed shortly thereafter by an announcement from the People’s Republic of China to purchase annually 500,000 tons of Cuban sugar for the following five years. In December 1960 the Soviet Union and several eastern bloc countries agreed to take the balance of Cuban sugar. By the end of the year, the bulk of Cuba’s sugar exports was pur- chased by the socialist bloc.

V Cuba was in transition again. Far-reaching changes were transforming the island, in large part, as in the past, the result of Cuban attempts to readjust on its own terms the nature of hegemonial relationships. This readjustment, in turn, served to shape the internal dynamic of transformation. The confrontation with the United States could not but accelerate the radicalization of the revolution. It aroused powerful nationalist sentiments, revived long historic grievances, created a national unanimity of purpose perhaps unattainable by any other means, all of which was masterfully directed by Fidel Castro. Cuba’s initial alignment with the Soviet Union was a response to this confrontation. In the end, confrontation with the United States necessitated realignment, and the realignment further deep- ened the confrontation. The revolution had challenged the fundamental prem- ises of U.S. hegemony in Cuba, and as the Cuban leadership moved implacably to eliminate U.S. influence in Cuba, the United States moved with equal deter- mination to remove the Cuban leadership. It is not certain that any one could

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have anticipated where this would all end, not the Cubans, not the North Amer- icans. However, it required no prophetic gift for Cubans to realize that this was a confrontation they could not hope to win, at least not alone.

The affirmation of the socialist character of the Cuban revolution and Fidel’s subsequent embrace of Marxism-Leninism must be seen as part political, in part programmatic, but above all pragmatic. It was a way to obtain protection and support without which the revolution would have eventually faltered and inevitably collapsed. It also presented the Soviet Union with a fait accompli, one that probably surprised the Soviets as much as the United States. Cuba had made a socialist revolution with only marginal participation by the communist party. The PSP had not led the revolution, it did not control the government, it did not even have a single member at ministerial rank in a government that pro- claimed itself socialist, and the head of state did not originate from the party ranks—all in all, anomalies that could not have escaped the attention of the Soviet leadership. At the same time, however, the Soviets could hardly refuse to assist a government that proclaimed membership in the socialist camp, not, at least, without suffering a blow to its prestige among Third World nations.

The confrontation with the United States, further, had important internal consequences for which Cubans had neither planned nor prepared. So central was the presence of North American property in the national economy that its expropriation suddenly thrust upon Cubans responsibility for managing pro- duction, resources, and distribution on a vast scale. The Cuban government found itself assuming an increasingly larger role in the management of the econ- omy. Once this process was underway, it was all but impossible to arrest and reverse.

Efficient and rational economic planning henceforth required greater con- trol of production, resources, and distribution, and not just in those sectors con- trolled by U.S. capital, however large that control may have been. The state sub- sequently consolidated control over virtually all key sectors of private enterprise, Cuban as well as North American. New, substantive investments had all but ceased, due in large measure to conditions of uncertainty during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Under these circumstances, it was not reasonable to expect pri- vate owners to take decisive initiatives to stimulate the economy. On the con- trary, under the political conditions prevailing between 1959 and 1961, it was easy to see that private enterprise might contemplate action damaging to national economic interests. In seizing private enterprise, the state acquired liq- uid assets estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, thereby allowing govern- ment agencies to allocate vital resources to other sectors of the economy, as well as plan production and direct investments in a rational way. By late 1961, approximately 85 percent of the total productive value of Cuban industry was under state control. The crisis with the United States, moreover, climaxing in the trade embargo, increased the importance of state planning to reorganize Cuban industry around Soviet exports and facilitate the integration of Cuban trade with the socialist bloc.

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The confiscation of North American property resulted in more than the elimination of the United States from the Cuban economy. It facilitated too the seizure of Cuban property. Cuban landowners, cattle ranchers, and property owners were dislodged with relative ease. Moreover, the rupture shattered the basis of collaboration between the Cuban middle classes and the United States. For the nearly 150,000 Cuban employees of North American enterprises, including managers, clerks, technicians, accountants, and attorneys, the expro- priations were traumatic. Many suffered immediately a decline in their standard of living, for Cubans in the employ of foreigners had traditionally enjoyed higher salaries. Foreign enterprise had also served to insulate them from the vagaries of the deepening political dispute. Middle-class Cubans working for foreign enterprises could oppose government policies without necessarily endangering their material well-being or job security. As state control over the private sector expanded, however, and government functionaries moved into ranking administrative and managerial positions, political loyalties acquired new importance and now determined employment or dismissal.

Nationalization transformed the state into employer and landlord and made middle-class Cubans associated with private enterprise and foreign interest sub- ject to new scrutiny. Those Cubans who opposed the revolution, no less than those who showed insufficient ardor for the revolution, were now enormously vulnerable. One Cuban refugee who had sought to remain uninvolved later recalled to Richard Fagen: “Life there was impossible. You had to be with them, or they would drive you crazy.” They were dismissed by the thousands, and their positions filled by loyal supporters of the revolution. Almost seven hundred employers of the Cuban Electric Company were fired and replaced by militants. By 1961, every senior administrator of the 161 sugar mills was a revolutionary. Indeed, between 1959 and 1961, that was the case in nearly 75 percent of the administrative positions of all sugar mills.

At the same time, entire sectors of the old economy became superfluous and disappeared, and with them the jobs of thousands of middle-class Cubans. Insurance services, real estate agencies, law firms, rent collectors, travel agen- cies, gambling casinos, and middlemen and brokers of all types were abolished. Thousands of opponents of the regime lost at once the positions with which to support themselves and the material basis on which to sustain opposition to the government. Countless thousands of other Cubans, largely members of the lib- eral professions, faced similar situations and resigned or were removed from positions in government. Once the elimination of the United States presence was underway, and its influence as an economic force and political powerbroker inside Cuba began to wane, those classes economically dependent on and ideo- logically allied to the United States all but collapsed. Those groups with the greatest resources and resolve to oppose the radicalization of the revolution found themselves vulnerable, without the institutional position or economic base from which to oppose the regime.

The radicalization of the revolution quickly assumed an internal logic of its own. As fidelista policies lost favor among liberals and moderates, it became nec-

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essary to find new political allies. This need was, in part, fulfilled by the support of the PSP. But the needs of the leadership were greater. As sectors of the mid- dle class passed from political support to armed opposition, it became necessary to broaden the social base of support. This is precisely what the radicalization of revolutionary programs and policies accomplished: the incorporation and mobi- lization of vast sectors of the population, including the poor, dispossessed, and unemployed. But it was also true that the mobilization of this population to defend the revolution added new pressures within the revolution. The broader the social base of the revolution, the greater the demand for radical change. It was a process that thrived on its own determination to survive, and that once started could not be reversed easily.

The control of mass organizations was achieved within the first year. The University Students’ Federation (FEU) passed under fidelista control. The CTC was under the PSP. After late 1959 the government embarked on the creation of new mass organizations designed specifically for the purpose of defense and political mobilization. In the autumn of 1959, the MINFAR created a civilian militia, a popular armed force that increased from 100,000 in 1960 to almost 300,000 in 1961. In August 1960, the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) was organized in direct response to a call from Fidel Castro for women to join the revolution. A month later, the government formed the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) for the purpose of combating internal sub- version and sabotage. By the end of the first year, the CDRs claimed a mem- bership of almost 800,000, with committees organized block by block, in every large factory, at all work centers. The CDRs were joined by the Association of Young Rebels (AJR), designed to mobilize and organize youths between the ages of 14 and 27. In May 1961, an estimated 100,000 farmers and peasants were organized into the National Organization of Small Agriculturalists (ANAP). At about the same time, the government launched a massive literacy campaign. Thousands of Cubans, men and women, were mobilized in a national campaign to eradicate illiteracy across the island and generate in still another form a revo- lutionary spirit during the critical period of its consolidation. By mid-1961, the proliferation of mass organizations had created a need for central coordination. In July, the government created one more organization, the Integrated Revo- lutionary Organization (ORI), which formed the nucleus for the formation of the new Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in 1965.

VI These were critical times in Cuba. The revolution was under attack from both within and without. By late 1960, political disaffection had found increasing expression in armed conflict. Anti-government elements armed themselves and launched new guerrilla operations. Urban sabotage again became common- place. In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency was organizing Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island, and when it arrived in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón), the only surprise was the ease and speed with

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which it was crushed. The survival of the revolution was all but guaranteed a year later, when the United States, as part of the negotiations to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba, agreed not to invade the island.

These developments had far-reaching consequences. Attacks against a gov- ernment that enjoyed wide support among vast numbers of Cubans had the effect of facilitating further political centralization. Under siege at home, under attack from abroad, the government moved quickly to eliminate all opposition. The Bay of Pigs brought matters to a climax. The government moved against anyone suspected of opposition to the regime, including priests, foreigners, and ordinary men and women, in and out of government. By the end of April an estimated 100,000 persons were imprisoned or otherwise detained. Virtually no suspected opponent of the government remained free in Cuba after that time. Prisons filled with political enemies. Most were released after the Cuban vic- tory at Girón, but by then all organized opposition had been effectively elimi- nated. Thereafter, planeload after planeload of Cubans left the island.

Within days of crushing the invasion, on the occasion of May Day 1961 Fidel Castro reiterated the socialist character of the revolution. The 1940 con- stitution was proclaimed “too old and outdated.” “That constitution,” Fidel announced, “has been left behind by this revolution, which, as we have said, is a socialist revolution.” There would be no further discussion of elections. “The Revolution has no time to waste in such foolishness.” Castro proclaimed that the revolution had “exchanged the conception of pseudo-democracy for direct gov- ernment by the people.” And again stressed: “This is a socialist regime.” In November 1961, Fidel Castro proclaimed: “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I shall be one until the last day of my life.”

VII The revolution established itself in a remarkably short space of time. Its social- ist character was apparently neither intrinsic to its original ideological content nor essential to its initial political ascendancy. There was no plan. That Fidel Castro was not from the outset a communist, that leadership was based on charismatic authority and in part legitimized by a rising swell of nationalism, served to obscure the implications of Cuban radicalism. The sequence of events that brought the socialist revolution to Cuba was more improvised than calcu- lated, more reaction than intention—up to a point. And after that point, Cubans moved deliberately, with design and dispatch. There was perhaps some- thing inevitable about these turns of events. The North Americans responded predictably, but this time the Cubans did not. History had prepared Cubans for North American reactions. There was nothing to prepare the United States for the Cuban response. In this sense, the Cubans had the advantage. Once initial reforms encountered foreign resistance, the alternatives facing Cubans were reduced to a stark two: do nothing or do everything. What they could not do was anything in between. There was no social base of support for moderate

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reform that would be, as in times past, too radical for property owners and too conservative for workers and peasants.

Cuba had stood at this threshold several times before in its history, but never before had crossed it. The situation in 1959 was significantly different from that of 1898 or 1933. One difference was the spellbinding presence of Fidel Castro: indefatigable, passionate, pragmatic, calculating. This time the charismatic leader had survived the armed struggle and remained to defend his vision from cor- ruption and compromise. Another difference was the role of the communist party. In 1933, it had adopted a posture of frank opposition to reform. Now the PSP collaborated. Another difference was the Soviet Union. There was no doubt more swagger than substance to Nikita Khrushchev’s threat in July 1960 to defend the Cuban people with Soviet “rocket fire if the aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to launch an intervention against Cuba.” It nevertheless served to add one more consideration into U.S. policy calculations. There was, in fact, no telling if, or how, or where, the Soviets would react to an attack against Cuba, and this uncertainty introduced an element of caution with which U.S. policy in the Caribbean had never before had to contend.

At the same time, it would be excessively facile to attribute the internal suc- cess of the Cuban revolution to Soviet assistance. Certainly the regime derived strength through support from the socialist bloc. But it was no less true that the regime was able to obtain outside support because it was strong from within. It had dismantled the old army and replaced it with a new one. It had organized a vast popular militia. It had demonstrated its capacity for mass mobilization. On its own it had stood up to U.S. authority and seized North American property, and survived. Its internal opponents were in disarray. Thus, well before the Soviets committed themselves, the Cuban regime was internally secure. This was the incentive for Soviet involvement, not the outcome. National strength begot international strength.

The revolutionary government was driven to adopt socialist structures by the logic of its reform agenda, especially the requirements of the Agrarian Reform Law. The nationalization of sugar properties involved the state directly in the organization and management of a strategic sector of the economy in varying degrees of decline, the revival of which, Cubans were convinced, required cen- tral planning and state-sponsored development. Cuban leadership employed socialist mechanisms early, not in reaction to hostility from the United States but as a response to national economic needs. These were strategies designed to implement reforms as fully and as quickly as possible and at the same time guar- antee the political ascendancy of revolutionary elements. The Cuban embrace of Marxism-Leninism, however, no less than the decision to ally the island with the Soviet bloc, was a different kind of strategy, and must be seen as a function of North American policy. Faced with the threat of extinction from a vastly supe- rior adversary, Cuban leaders took the steps necessary to guarantee their survival.

What was especially striking about the sequence of events between 1959 and 1961 was the comparative ease with which the essential character of the revolu-

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tion was transformed. No national institutions, no internal structures, no person seemed capable of containing the radicalization of the revolution. Much of this, certainly, was the result of the central role played by Fidel Castro. But no less important were the specific historical conditions in which the revolution unfolded in mid-twentieth-century Cuba. National institutions were in varying degrees of disrepute. There was no outcry against the suppression of old politi- cal parties, for the old political parties had served few other than the professional politicians, who were, in any case, already discredited. There was little protest against the seizures of opposition newspapers. They had more than adequately prepared the way for their own destruction. Their credibility was suspect and their integrity doubted, for it was commonly known that they had long accepted subsidies from previous, corrupt regimes. Few Cubans mourned their passing. The old armed forces had been defeated and demobilized. A new army was formed out of the victorious guerrilla columns, commanded by loyal fidelistas. The army command underwent ideological transformation and thereby served as a defender of and not a deterrent to radical change. Nor was the church effec- tive in restraining revolution. In fact, the Catholic church was a negligible factor in national life. A total of 725 priests, one for every 7,850 parishioners, exercised only limited influence on the island. Priests were mainly Spaniards, located largely in the cities, ministering mostly to white, middle-class congregations. The church had little national credibility, and when it warned against the perils of communism, its influence was limited to those sectors of the population already on the defensive. By the early 1960s, further, the sector of the popula- tion over which the church had the greatest influence was already in exile.

The skewed social order in Cuba rendered least effective the classes with the most to lose. There were few bourgeois institutions and less class affinity. This disarticulation had begun in the late nineteenth century with the collapse of the planter bourgeoisie and continued through the 1930s with the demise of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. Both were subsequently integrated directly into the structures of North American capitalism. The eclipse of an independent Cuban national bourgeoisie all but precluded the emergence of an effective and autonomous defense of class interests. Bourgeois class institutions and class coop- eration had failed to develop fully. Instead, sectors of the bourgeoisie had pur- sued their own narrow interests independently and often in conflict. Industrial- ists and manufacturers resented the prominence of the sugar industry. Small sugar producers were unhappy with large sugar producers. Colonos resented the con- trol of mill owners. Small ranchers turned against big ranchers. Cubans employed by North American firms were suspicious of the economic nationalism of Cuban-owned enterprises. Rice growers resented sugar producers, and both dis- trusted cattle ranchers. Light industry was in conflict with heavy industry. They all tended to function independently, uninterested in coordination and cooper- ation, and hence were eminently vulnerable. Sugar producers were indifferent to urban reform measures. Many manufacturers and industrialists initially approved the Agrarian Reform Law. In a surge of economic nationalism many Cuban

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property owners denounced foreign control of the economy. Local manufactur- ers welcomed restrictions on foreign imports, and in similar fashion national pro- ducers did not initially lament the expropriation of North American property.

When their demise became imminent, large sectors of the middle class dis- covered they lacked the effective political institutions, ideology, and experience with which to defend their interests. This, in turn, set the stage for one of the developments critical to the consolidation of the revolution. Unable to oppose the revolution, disaffected Cubans emigrated by the tens of thousands. The loss of population in the early years was stunning: 62,000 in 1960, 67,000 in 1961, 66,000 in 1962.

Middle-class flight between 1959 and 1962 was in part spontaneous, in part sponsored. For the Cuban government, emigration was a relatively cost-effective means through which to eliminate vast sectors of the opposition, and it therefore facilitated their departure. For the United States, the spectacle of tens of thou- sands of Cubans fleeing the island was the stuff of good propaganda, and it too encouraged their flight. That the emigration happened to include a dispropor- tionate number of technicians and professionals provided the United States with an opportunity to cause Havana hardship of another kind by draining the island of trained personnel. Washington eased visa requirements, and subsequently dropped them altogether. Cubans were henceforth free to enter the United States in unlimited numbers.

Departing Cubans, for their part, were themselves acting out the final scene of a century-long drama. For almost three generations, Cubans of means, own- ers of property, holders of positions, had looked to the United States for protec- tion against the forces of radical change that periodically challenged the status quo. Cuban elites had historically shown themselves ill-prepared to defend their interests on their own. This was not the first time that local elites were challenged by popular forces—it had happened in 1895–98 and again in 1931–33. On both occasions, they were saved by U.S. intervention. Few Cubans who departed between 1959 and 1962 could have remotely anticipated that their expatriation would become permanent. Many believed their absence would be a short one, a period during which the United States would step into the breach and return them and the island to the way it used to be. There was no need to be unduly exercised or overly alarmed, emigrating Cubans reassured themselves. The United States would not tolerate a communist government ninety miles from its shores. “I waited for one more year,” one Cuban refugee explained, “thinking when the North American properties were nationalized the U.S. Government would step in to prevent this action. The moment came, and nothing happened.” “The passivity of the former possessing classes was startling,” commented Philip W. Bonsal, the U.S. ambassador to Cuba during these months. “The Revolution was vastly encouraged by the demonstrated impotence of the old order. The dis- possessed and their friends believed that the United States would soon set things in order again.” Bonsal made another point: “A conviction that the U.S. would take care of the situation sapped the activism of much of the opposition.”

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The exportation of counter-revolution foreclosed any possibility of a sus- tained and extensive internal challenge to the revolution. The flight of the opposition served also to strengthen the revolutionary consensus within the island, thereby contributing in another fashion to the further consolidation of the government. Henceforth, organized opposition to the revolution developed outside of Cuba, largely in the United States. But even in this instance, the pos- sibilities of Cubans organizing independent and autonomous opposition capa- bilities were severely limited by the circumstances of their expatriation. Almost entirely dependent on funding and support from the Central Intelligence Agency, Cuban exiles became instruments of North American policy, without the means of organizing into a genuine opposition force, unable to articulate autonomous strategies, and incapable of developing objectives independent of U.S. policy needs. Their ultimate demise was nothing less than a function of their original ascendancy.

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