The Cuban Revolution (1953-1959) final questions

A History of the Cuban Revolution

Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista: Themes and Interpretations in Latin American History

Series editor: Jürgen Buchenau

The books in this series will introduce students to the most significant themes and topics in Latin American history. They represent a novel approach to designing supplementary texts for this growing market. Intended as supplementary textbooks, the books will also discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating to students that our understanding of our past is con- stantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Unlike monographs, the books in this series will be broad in scope and written in a style accessible to undergraduates.

Published A History of the Cuban Revolution, Second Edition Aviva Chomsky

Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas Lawrence A. Clayton

Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United States Timothy J. Henderson

The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregón and the Mexican Revolution Jürgen Buchenau

A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution Jeremy Popkin

Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs. Peninsulars? Mark A. Burkholder

Dictatorship in South America Jerry Dávila

Mothers Making Latin America Erin E. O’Connor

A History of the Cuban Revolution

Second Edition

Aviva Chomsky

This edition first published 2015 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Edition history: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1e, 2011) Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148!5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley!blackwell. The right of Aviva Chomsky to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging!in!Publication Data Chomsky, Aviva, 1957– A history of the Cuban Revolution / Aviva Chomsky. – Second edition. pages cm Original edition published in 2011. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-94228-4 (pbk.) 1. Cuba–History–Revolution, 1959. 2. Cuba–History–Revolution, 1959–Influence. I. Title. F1788.C465 2015 972.9106!4–dc23 2014040325 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: José Fuster, Untitled, 2003. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Collection of Janine & Joseph Gonyea III, Photograph by Jonathan B. Smith. Set in 10/12.5pt Minion by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2015

Contents

List of Illustrations viii Series Editor’s Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Timeline xii

Introduction 1 Talking about Freedom 2 Scholars Weigh In 3 Why Revolution? 5 Comparing Capitalism and Socialism 8 Latin American Attitudes 12

1 Cuba through 1959 15 Colonial History 15 The Colony in the Republic 20 Revolution: A War, or a Process? 28

2 Experiments with Socialism 36 Analyzing the Situation: Economic Backwardness 37 The 1960s: Experimentation and the Great Debate 40 The 1970s: Institutionalization and the Soviet Model 45 Cuba in the 1970s: How it Worked 46 1986: Rectification 51 How Democratic was Cuban Socialism? 51

3 Relations with the United States 54 The United States and Cuba 55 In their Own Words: U.S. Policymakers Respond to Revolution 57 Covert War: Up to the Bay of Pigs 63

vi Contents

Covert War: After the Bay of Pigs 65 The Missile Crisis 68 After the Missile Crisis 70 The War Continues 72

4 Emigration and Internationalism 75 Miami 78 Beyond Miami 80 Cuba’s Global Reach: Beyond the Cold War 81 Cuba and Black Internationalism 82 Cuba in Africa and Latin America 84 Civilian Aid Missions 86

5 Art, Culture, and Revolution 88 Literature 89 Film 94 Music 98 Sport 100 Dance 102 Food 103 Political Culture and Cultural Politics 105

6 Cuba Diversa 110 Race 110 Gender 116 Sexuality 119 Religion 123

7 The “Special Period”: Socialism on One Island 126 1993–95: Rapid!Fire Reforms 126 Social Impact of the Market Reforms 130 Limits to Capitalism 132 Charting New Territory 134 Contradictions: Inequality and Jineterismo 135 Opting to Leave: The 1994 Exodus 138 Debate and its Limits during the 1990s 141 Debating Democracy 142 Limits to Debate 146

8 Cuba into the Twenty!First Century 149 From Perfeccionamiento to Recentralization 150 Disillusionment 153 Cuba after Fidel: A New Era? 155

Contents vii

Civil Society into the New Century 159 U.S. Policy: The Bush Era 163 Cuba, Venezuela, and the ALBA 164 Barack Obama and Raúl Castro: A New Relationship? 166 Analyzing the Changes 168

Conclusion 171

Glossary 174 Notes 177 Bibliography 198 Index 214

28 Cuba through 1959

One could say that there were at least two Cubas in the 1950s. One was the 1.5 million who were jobless or who belonged to the rural poor, including landless workers and campesinos with small plots. These impoverished Cubans survived mostly on rice, a few beans, and sugar! water, creating the “naked children, their swollen stomachs testifying to an unbalanced diet and infection from parasitic worms” that sociologist Lowry Nelson found everywhere in rural Cuba in 1950. At the other end of the spectrum, the 900,000 or so wealthiest Cubans controlled 43 percent of the country’s income. These were the people who had money to spend on frequent shopping jaunts to Miami, luxurious, air conditioned homes, and even mausoleums complete with “elevators, air conditioners, and telephones” to make sure they continued to enjoy a high level of comfort in the afterlife. In between, another 3.5 million struggled to make ends meet. Cuba’s close integration with the U.S. economy meant that almost everything Cubans bought was imported from the United States, and the cost of living was as high or higher than in the United States. But Cuban wages were much lower, and Cubans had none of the social services and guarantees that U.S. citizens enjoyed.34 In many ways, the country was ripe for revolution.

Revolution: A War, or a Process?

A song by Carlos Puebla, a troubadour who chronicled the events of the early revolutionary years, captures some of the heady optimism of the revolutionary victory and its rejection of the past:

They thought they could go on forever here, earning their 100% profits With their apartment houses, and leaving the people to suffer. And go on cruelly conspiring against the people To continue exploiting them… And then Fidel arrived! The party was over: The Comandante arrived and ordered it to stop!

Many of the actors and events in Cuba’s revolutionary history have been elevated to mythical status, not only in Cuba, but around the world. In 2000, Time Magazine named Che Guevara as one of the 100 most impor- tant figures of the previous century. “His figure stares out at us from coffee mugs and posters, jingles at the end of key rings and jewelry, pops up in rock songs and operas and art shows,” Time noted.35 In Cuba, it is impossible to pass a day without confronting Che’s image. Schoolchildren chant “¡Seremos como el Che!” – we will be like Che – to launch the

Cuba through 1959 29

school day (Figure"1.2).36 The United States has its American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Statue of Liberty as symbols of what many believe to be the essence of the country and its national identity. Cuba elevates figures from its nineteenth!century revolutionary war against Spain to heroic status, and it does the same with many of the people and events central to the 1959 Revolution. None quite reaches the iconic status of José Martí, whose bust is ubiquitous in public places and whose name graces numerous institutions. But the leaders of the 1959 Revolution have also achieved outsized status in Cuba.

Che Guevara became the most mythologized leader for several rea- sons. Unlike the other revolutionary leaders, he was not Cuban. Rather, he was a Marxist physician from Argentina, who left his country to devote his life to the revolutionary cause. He was also something of a revolutionary philosopher, leaving his mark on Marxist thought with his ideas about guerrilla warfare and, even more, about the goals and nature of socialism. He was the architect of some of the most radical and utopian

Figure 1.2 Print by Cuban artist Sandra Ramos, “Seremos como el Che” (We will be like Che). Source: Sandra Ramos, 1993, “Seremos como el Che.” Etching/ aquatint 40 # 50 cm. © Sandra Ramos

30 Cuba through 1959

economic reforms implemented in Cuba in the early 1960s, when it seemed to many that virtually anything was possible. He also came to symbolize the Revolution’s commitment to internationalism, to solidar- ity with revolutionary movements from Africa to Latin America. Finally, he died a martyr, trying to bring his revolutionary theories to the moun- tains of Bolivia, in 1967. Thus his image has forever remained associated with the sense of infinite possibility of the early days of the Revolution, rather than with the compromises made through the decades of revolu- tionary power.

Behind the various heroes are the organizations and movements they participated in or led, and the many others whose work, and names, did not make it into the history books. The July 26th Movement that initiated a revolutionary war against the Batista government in 1953, a year after the coup, and led the final victory march into Havana on New Year’s Eve, 1958, brought together a diverse and complex set of leaders and organizations.

The group took its name from its first action: the July 26th, 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks in eastern Cuba that initiated the uprising against Batista. Fidel Castro, who led the attack, like most of the other predominantly young men who joined him, was involved with the student movement and the Ortodoxo Party, founded in 1947 by former student leader Eduardo Chibás to resurrect the ideals of the 1933 reform movements. “The Moncada showed us the road to follow,” Carlos Puebla sang, “And since that great example, for us it is always the 26th.”37

The plan was to take the barracks, and call upon the population to rise up in rebellion. It was a miserable failure in military terms. The attack was repelled, and 61 out of the 160 or so attackers were killed. Many of the others were captured on the spot or, like Fidel, shortly after escaping the scene. Cuba’s Communist Party condemned the attack as “adventurism guided by bourgeois misconceptions” and for suffering “lack of theoretical cohesion and ideology.”38

But as Puebla’s lyrics suggest, Moncada came to occupy an exalted spot in revolutionary historiography as symbolizing the beginning of a complete break with Cuba’s past. For its audacity, its youthfulness, and its sheer drama, as well as for launching Fidel Castro’s long career as a revo- lutionary, the meaning of Moncada has expanded over the years. Even the bullet holes in the building have been recreated and maintained as a tourist attraction. In a further symbolic gesture, the barracks were con- verted, after the revolutionary victory, into an educational complex.

From prison, Fidel penned his own defense. He freely admitted his participation in the attack, but turned the speech into a wide!ranging

Cuba through 1959 31

denunciation of the Batista regime and defense of the right to resist illegitimate authority, citing everything from Cuba’s 1940 Constitution to Montesquieu, St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther. The U.S. Declaration of Independence, he reminded the court, declared that a government’s authority rested on the consent of the governed. “Condemn me – it does not matter!” he concluded stirringly. “History will absolve me.”39

The document also outlined a revolutionary project. Castro appealed to Cubans who were unemployed, to the campesinos and farm laborers, and to the urban professionals for whom political corruption closed all opportunity. He laid out the five “revolutionary laws” that the Moncada attackers intended to implement: restoration and implementation of the 1940 Constitution, an agrarian reform putting land in the hands of those who tilled it, obligation of employers to share profits with workers, guar- anteed markets for small sugar farmers, and confiscation of all enter- prises obtained through fraud and corruption. All of these revolutionary laws, he emphasized, were based on the Constitution itself, which restricted large landholdings and provided labor rights.

It was a program that could unify Cuba’s fragmented opposition – but during most of the 1950s, various organizations and ideologies competed for the population’s support in bringing about political change. Some advocated armed uprising, while others, like the now!banned Communist Party, believed that the organized labor movement must be the chief pro- tagonist. It was not until 1958 that the July 26th Movement emerged as the conclusive leader of the struggle. “To reach January 1st, 1959,” Julia Sweig suggests, “the 26th of July not only had to mount a two!year mili- tary campaign [two years, because it began in 1956 when Castro returned from exile] but also a political campaign against many of the forces that were also seeking an end to the Batista regime.”40 In a way, it’s a back- wards!looking history that now proclaims the Moncada attack as the first shot of the Revolution. At the time, it appeared to be one more crazy, failed scheme.

If the Moncada attack came to symbolize the opening of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro’s return to the island after being released from prison and sent into exile in Mexico, with some 80 other revolutionaries on the yacht Granma in 1956, constitutes the second act. The Granma today rests proudly in Havana’s Museo de la Revolución, and Cuba’s main daily newspaper, the official organ of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, takes its name from the boat.41

As a military expedition, however, the Granma landing was not much more successful than the Moncada attack. An uprising planned in the city of Santiago to coincide with the boat’s arrival was quickly crushed,

32 Cuba through 1959

and government forces greeted the Granma as it landed and succeeded in killing most of the 82 would!be rebels. Fidel and his brother Raúl Castro, along with Che Guevara, escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba. “They thought they could go on, swallowing up more and more land,” sang Carlos Puebla, “without even knowing that there in the Sierra, the future was dawning.”42

The mountains of eastern Cuba proved fertile ground for rebellion. Since colonial times they had harbored their share of outlaws, squatters, and rebels.43 The expansion of the U.S.!dominated sugar plantation econ- omy into eastern Cuba during the early twentieth century only increased the ranks of the dispossessed and the discontented.

The rural rebellion has held the place of pride in Cuban historiogra- phy. Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare promoted and popularized the idea of the foco – the theory that a small group of dedicated guerrilla fighters could set off a mass uprising through spectacular acts, and that peasant uprising was the key to revolution in Latin America. The sierra strategy was to defeat Batista’s army in the countryside.

One reason that the sierra became so important in Cuban historiogra- phy of the Revolution is because of how it shaped revolutionary ideology and programs. Leaders like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were fighting for radical change before they spent time in the sierra. But it was during those sierra years that the goals of the July 26th Movement developed and crystallized. “Among the factors influencing the development of the pos- trevolutionary health ideology, the single most important was the guer- rillas’ confrontation with the abject poverty and enormous health problems of the rural population,” Julie Feinsilver argues.44 Rural poverty had to do with lack of money, but it also had to do with lack of jobs, lack of social services, and lack of education. From an urban, middle class vantage point, it was not so easy to see the deeply imbedded, structural nature of rural poverty. Living with the rural poor was a consciousness! raising experience. Two key aspects of the later revolutionary program grew from the sierra: one, the need for a fundamental redistribution of resources that focused on the countryside; and two, the need for nation! building and consciousness!raising, by bringing urban Cubans face to face with the realities of rural poverty.

The sierra was also important to the revolutionary ideology that linked the 1950s uprising directly to the failed struggles for national independence and social justice of the past. Eastern Cuba was where the War of Independence had begun, where it had radicalized, and where the Cuban cause found its “first and most ardent supporters.”45 The July 26th Movement aimed to fulfill the project that José Martí and so many others

Cuba through 1959 33

had died for. In 1898, U.S. occupation forces prevented the Cuban rebel army from entering the eastern capital of Santiago. “What happened in 1895 will not happen again,” Fidel proclaimed on the verge of entering Santiago on December 31, 1958. “This time the mambises will advance on Santiago de Cuba!”46

Still, the sierra may have been less key to the Revolution in military terms than the historiography has suggested. Recently historians have turned to the urban organizations and emphasized their important role in the July 26th Movement. The llano (plains, in contrast to the sierra or mountains) strategy aimed to force Batista’s resignation through urban insurrection. Julia Sweig argues that from 1957–58 the urban under- ground wing of the Movement, led by middle!class youth and focusing on acts of sabotage leading up to a general strike, held center stage in Cuba’s revolutionary war. It was only after the general strike planned for April, 1958 failed that Fidel and Che’s sierra movement emerged preemi- nent in the revolutionary coalition.47 Lillian Guerra argues that the myth- ical status accorded to the struggle in the sierra was part of a move by Fidel and his trusted circle to consolidate power by sidelining urban radi- cals and their well!organized movements.48

Curiously, a U.S. journalist, writing for the New York Times, gave Fidel Castro’s sierra guerrillas’ revolt an unexpected boost and contributed to the sierra’s mythmaking qualities. Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews travelled into the sierra to interview Fidel in February, 1957, just months after the failed Granma expedition. His explosive report appeared on the front page of the Times and brought Castro into U.S. living rooms. “He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections,” Matthews reported. Another Times reporter would later dub Matthews “the man who invented Fidel.”49

Until March of 1958, the United States stood behind its ally Batista, supplying his government with arms and ammunition. Just as the rebels were unifying and gaining strength, the government lost its most impor- tant pillar of support when the United States cut off military aid. What Batista hoped would be a final offensive against the rebels in the summer of 1958 failed, and the rebel counteroffensive that began in August proved inexorable. Batista’s army, though large and well equipped, was poorly trained and poorly motivated. As 1958 drew to a close, the rebel armies took city after city and moved in on the capital, as the United States scrambled ineffectually to derail a July 26th victory or to impose an alter- native that they believed would be more amenable to U.S. control.50

Much ink has been spent in the United States trying to pinpoint when, exactly, the Cuban Revolution became a socialist revolution, or when

34 Cuba through 1959

Fidel Castro became a Communist. It’s important to remember that Communist and other Marxist political parties and organizations were active in Latin America throughout the twentieth century. The Communist parties were generally those that allied with the Comintern, while other independent Marxist parties and organizations followed dif- ferent leaders, methods, and goals. Despite U.S. preoccupation with Communism, the Soviet Union and the Comintern generally did not support the idea of armed revolution in Latin America, and they did not support the revolution in Cuba in the 1950s. Soviet!aligned parties like the PCC (which renamed itself the Partido Socialista Popular [Popular Socialist Party or PSP] in 1944) were involved in labor organizing, and often in electoral politics, but generally not in armed resistance. The PSP was a late and reluctant participant in the July 26th Coalition that led Cuba’s armed revolution, joining it only in the summer of 1958, when the fall of the Batista regime was virtually assured.

Much more important to Latin America’s revolutionary movements has been the ideology and legacy of Che Guevara. Mexican commentator Jorge Castañeda, author of a popular study of the Latin American Left as well as a biography of Che Guevara, argues that Che’s legacy for Latin America lies primarily in his commitment to revolutionary violence and guerrilla warfare, and in the obstacles that his larger!than!life romanti- cism places in the way of more “modern” leftist alternatives.51 In this per- spective, Che and his Marxist thought have only served to lead many Latin Americans – both would!be revolutionaries, and even more so, those unwillingly caught up in their struggles – to their deaths.

But Che’s legacy, and his place in the Cuban and the global popular imagination, go beyond his military feats and his theorizing about guer- rilla warfare. Just as important was his reformulation of socialist ideas. In his many and well!translated writings, Che argued that Communism could not be reduced to a mere reformation of the economy. Rather, “Communism is a phenomenon of consciousness” – a means of over- coming alienation, of creating a “new man.” “I am not interested in dry economic socialism,” Che wrote. “We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation … Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the human spirit. If communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distribut- ing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.”52

Cuban historian and philosopher Juan Antonio Blanco (who now teaches at Miami!Dade College) echoed this strain in Che’s thought in an interview in 1993: “Che’s criticism of the Soviet Union and the socialist

Cuba through 1959 35

camp was that they were obsessed with the economic construction of socialism and that they were disregarding the moral and spiritual factors of socialist societies. Che once said in an interview that he was not inter- ested in economic socialism. If you disregard the spiritual factors and only attempt to deal with economic factors, you are not going to get rid of alienation. For both Che and Fidel, socialism was not simply a matter of developing a new way of distribution. It was a question of freeing people from alienation at the same time.”53

The idea of the hombre nuevo or New Man found strong echoes in alternative and revolutionary movements around the world, even after the idea of guerrilla warfare had faded. Historian Van Gosse has argued that the New Left in the United States took more than a little inspiration from Cuba’s attempt to create a new, humane form of socialism.54 From the Counterculture of the 1960s to the New Age movements of the 1990s, critiques of the spiritual and human poverty of capitalism and material- ism referred to Che’s positions. Most recently, President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela announced the country’s commitment to creating the hombre nuevo there: “The old values of individualism, capitalism and egoism must be demolished,” he declared.55

Although public U.S. pronouncements on the Cuban Revolution emphasized the issue of “Communism,” a close look at internal U.S. government correspondence at the time shows a somewhat different concern. In the early years of the Revolution the issues of Soviet influ- ence, human rights, or military threat to the United States rarely surface in U.S. diplomatic correspondence. Instead, what the State Department and the diplomats on the ground worried about was what kind of economic policies Cuba was going to pursue, and in particular, how U.S. businesses in Cuba would be affected. Further, they were quite concerned about how the Cuban example might inspire other Latin American coun- tries to attempt similar economic transformations to the detriment of U.S. investors. As J. C. Hill of the Bureau of Inter!American Affairs at the State Department put it in September, 1959, “There are indications that if the Cuban Revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.”56

When Fidel Castro’s troops made their triumphant entrance into Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959, the war was over, but the revolution was just about to begin. In Cuba, “the Revolution” refers to a 50!year process of consciously creating a new society with many different phases, twists and turns.

A History of the Cuban Revolution, Second Edition. Aviva Chomsky. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Experiments with Socialism

2

This chapter begins with the economy, and looks at how Cuba has experimented with bold economic change, beginning with agrarian reform and leading to virtually complete nationalization of the economy. It highlights everyday issues of production and consumption in areas like food, housing, education, and health care, in the context of domestic and global politics. It focuses on social and ideological, as well as economic, aspects of Cuba’s version of socialism. Voluntarism, massive incorpora- tion of women into the workforce, socialization of child rearing, and rationing all characterized Cuba’s “socialism with pachanga.”1

The July 26th Movement began its experiment at governance on January 1st, 1959, with an enormous popular support and legitimacy. Its diverse supporters, though, had very different ideas about what kind of new system should replace the old. Some wanted merely an end to Batista’s corrupt rule and a restoration of constitutional order, with little funda- mental social change. Others saw a more revolutionary opportunity in the collapse of the old order and the overwhelming popular mandate behind the new government. Could a revolution overcome dependency, poverty, and underdevelopment? Could it create a new society, and a new!man?

Certainly, dependence on the USSR came to characterize socialist Cuba. But the Revolution encompassed many other political, social, cul- tural, and economic changes as well. Most historians periodize the Cuban Revolution by its economic phases, shifts, and landmarks. Such a perio- dization would characterize the 1960s as the decade of experimentation, starting by trying to shift the economy away from sugar, but returning to it later in the decade. The radically experimental phase ended with the

Experiments with Socialism 37

failed attempt to achieve a record 10 million ton harvest in 1970. The years 1970–86 saw increasing political and economic dependence on the! USSR, institutionalization and bureaucratization, and, starting in 1980, market openings. The 1986 Rectification Campaign has been much debated by those who have analyzed it, but all agree that it halted the experimentation with markets.

The fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989 drastically undercut Cuba’s economic model, and the Special Period in Time of Peace declared in 1991 began a series of major economic reforms. Once again, it’s difficult to capture the trend since 1991 in a single generalization. Sociologist Susan Eckstein usefully characterized the post"1990 reforms as falling into three categories: socialist, capitalist, and pre"capitalist.

Chapters 7 and 8 will examine the post"1990 period. The rest of this chapter will trace Cuba’s domestic political–economic development during the first 30 years of the Revolution. It will pay special attention to identifying where radical changes have taken place over the course of the Revolution, and what ideas and policies can be said to characterize the Revolution as a whole.

Analyzing the Situation: Economic Backwardness

The idea that the Revolution must bring about political independence and social justice was deeply rooted in Cuba’s own revolutionary history. As the new leaders analyzed their country’s situation and began to develop and implement policies, they drew on a wide range of revolu- tionary and reformist ideologies to develop their programs. In addition to those described in the Introduction, Cuban revolutionary leaders looked to, and contributed to, contemporary debates about the meaning and nature of economic development.

After World War II social scientists developed several kinds of critiques of the state of the world, and different ideas for how to improve living standards in its poorer areas. Modernization theorists explained the higher standard of living in what came to be called the First World – Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia – as the result of its economic development. They saw development as a linear process, and argued that the “backward” or “underdeveloped” countries needed to move forward along the same path to industrialization in order to catch up with the “developed” world.2

Dependency theorists, primarily coming from Latin America and influenced by Marxism, challenged this linear view. They argued that the

38 Experiments with Socialism

industrialized countries had benefited from their colonial relations with Latin America and Africa, and that economic development in the former was based on their exploitation of the latter. The colonies had undergone dependent development based on foreign domination of their economies and the production of primary goods for export to the industrializing colonial powers. Dependent development was skewed in a number of ways. Landed elites maintained a near"feudal control in the countryside, profiting from the labor of a large and extremely poor peasantry. Modern urban areas served the needs of a small elite linked to foreign capital. Income was squandered on luxury consumption by this elite, rather than invested in production. Foreign capital controlled key sectors of the economy. Democratic institutions were weak or nonexistent. This meant that foreign capital reigned supreme, and major decisions about the use of the country’s resources were made by outsiders, for the benefit of outsiders.3

Cuba’s economy exhibited many of the characteristics associated with economic dependency. Three"quarters of the country’s arable land was used to produce sugar, which accounted for 80 percent of its exports. Forty percent of the farms and 55 percent of the mills were in the hands of U.S. companies. U.S. investors also controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s telecommunications and electrical services and half of the country’s railroads, as well as significant portions of the banking, cattle, mining, petroleum, and tourist industries.4 Almost a quarter of those with jobs worked in the sugar industry, and most of these only seasonally. Technical development helped planters reduce the time of the harvest from 10!months at the beginning of the twentieth century to only three months by the 1950s, meaning that seasonal unemployment skyrocketed.5

While Cuba’s small middle and upper classes, who resided primarily in Havana, enjoyed reasonably high levels of access to education, health care, and urban amenities, the majority of the population was rural and poor – what Cubans called guajiros. Swedish economist Claes Brunendius described a typical guajiro’s life this way: “He lived in a bohío, a small house with an earthen floor and a roof made of palm thatch. For 90 percent of the guajiros, a kerosene lamp was the only form of lighting, and 44! percent of them had never attended school. Only 11 percent drank milk, only 4 percent ate meat, and only 2 percent ate eggs. The daily diet, which had a deficiency of 1,000 calories, was the main reason for a constant increase in the number of cases of tuberculosis, anemia, parasitic diseases, and other illnesses.”6

Dependency also affected the relatively privileged urban sectors, though. “The modern Cuban eats hot dogs, hamburgers, hot cakes, waffles,

Experiments with Socialism 39

fried chicken and ice cream,” commented an American journalist in 1957. “It has become almost impossible in Havana today to find native foods such as malanga, yuca, picadillo or ajiaco.”7 Though something of an exaggeration – in fact small food stands continued to offer traditional Cuban foods throughout the city – the observation reflected an overall reality that many Cubans saw as a decidedly mixed blessing. “The Cuban is unfortunately fading into the distant past,” wrote one commentator in the 1920s. “Soon … there will be nothing remaining except a stylized caricature of the yanki … where chewing gum and tortoiseshell eye glasses will complete our conversion into puppets ‘Made in the U.S.’.”8 It was the same problem José Martí had critiqued in the 1870s: “Our youth go out into the world wearing Yankee" or French"colored glasses and aspire to rule by guesswork a country they do not know.” And his solution: “Statesmen who arise from the nation must replace statesmen who are alien to it … Make wine from plantains, it may be sour, but it is our wine!”9

Breaking the economic and psychological dependency on the United States was clearly to be an overriding goal of the Revolution. But Cuban planners were also keen to avoid some of the darker side of industrialization in backward countries. In both the socialist bloc and in capitalist Latin America, the push to industrialize had been funded by a super"exploitation of the peasant class. In the USSR and China, peasants starved in famines. In Latin America, there was no widespread famine, but peasants still starved – slowly. In the twentieth century they also fled the countryside, in desperate hope of improving their livelihoods in the cities. They flooded into sprawling urban slums and shantytowns.

Many of the leaders of Cuba’s guerrilla war came from middle class, urban, educated backgrounds. Castro himself was the son of a sugar planter, educated at Catholic boarding schools and with a law degree from the University of Havana. Their experience fighting in the moun- tains of eastern Cuba was key to their political formation. In the sierra they were confronted with realities of the agro"export economy, with rural poverty, and with the desperate needs in the countryside.

So another pillar of the Cuban development model was to reduce ine- qualities between city and countryside by privileging rural development. Schools, universities, health clinics, theaters, electricity, running water – all of these so"called urban amenities would come to the countryside. Yet another aspect of the rural orientation was the idea that urban Cubans must have their consciousness raised by directly experiencing the rural realities. Until the 1990s, this position remained a constant, despite the many twists and turns in the economy.

40 Experiments with Socialism

The 1960s: Experimentation and the Great Debate

The first weeks and months after January 1st, 1959, were characterized by a series of radical reforms that drastically redistributed Cuba’s wealth and income. “Expectations ran high, were met, and then raised higher again,” writes historian Louis Pérez. “Labor received wage increases, the unem- ployed received jobs. The urban proletariat received rent and utility rate reductions. Peasants received land and credit … The effects were visible. A significant redistribution 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.”10 Social services were vastly expanded, and made available free of charge or at very low cost. “Basic social services” that were cost"free included “schooling, medical care, medicines, and social security, but also water, burial services, sports facilities, even public phones.” Rates for utilities and public transportation were slashed.11

The Revolution overturned the cultural and ideological, as well as the economic, status quo. Lillian Guerra shows how mass mobilizations and rallies, religious imagery, emphasis on unity, and a “grand narrative of redemption with Fidel as its primary author” characterized the Revolution’s early years and underlay a long"lasting revolutionary culture. The dispossessed – in particular, poor rural Cubans and Afro" Cubans – were to be the foundation of a “new nationality.” The revolución con pachanga “became political shorthand for describing support for the Revolution as a form of historical inversion of eurocentric values and a white"dominated cultural order. According to the paradigm of pachanga, Fidel was… a long"sought ally and secret admirer of black Cubans’ centuries’ long struggle for radical change.”12

Restructuring production into a viable, egalitarian economy, however, required more than just popular mobilization, and was a lot harder than the initial redistribution of existing resources. In the “Great Debate” of the early 1960s, Cuban revolutionary leaders, economists, and thinkers explored how socialism could be implemented in the Cuban context. Did Cuba need follow the path described by Marx and advocated by the Communist Party, through capitalism to socialism and communism? Or could it eliminate the market altogether and create a new, utopian econ- omy from the ground up?

Cuba’s challenges were exacerbated by two factors that all such experi- ments have faced: capital flight, and social capital flight. In a capitalist

Experiments with Socialism 41

economy, investment comes from private individuals or institutions (like!banks) that invest their money based on where they believe a profit can be made. If a revolutionary government starts to limit the ability to! make a profit – by raising wages or placing legal restrictions on businesses – capitalists will start to look elsewhere. They may place their money in foreign banks, or invest in enterprises overseas. In other words, capital flight.

Second, the formerly privileged classes, who generally have high levels of education, skills, business contacts, and other forms of what social scientists call social capital often decide to flee the country themselves when they see their privileges evaporating. The institutions (like private schools, maids, and fancy restaurants) and the luxury items that their status depends on are no longer available. Their comfortable lifestyles and sense of autonomy are threatened or undermined. They may have relatives or friends abroad, they may even have attended private school or college in the United States. They have the resources to leave – and many of them do. Half of Cuba’s 6,000 doctors, for example, emigrated in the years immediately following the Revolution.13 The country loses their social capital – the very skills, education, and contacts that it most needs to restructure its economy.

Cuba’s new leaders vowed to break the island’s historic dependence on sugar exports. Sugar, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz had argued in 1940, meant foreign, colonial domination; it meant slavery and dispossessed workers; it meant dependence, backwardness, and under- development. Many economists and other social scientists in the 1960s agreed. Cuban leaders vowed to modernize the economy and overcome the island’s historic dependence by diversifying agriculture and by promoting industrialization. It was not an unprecedented goal – but Cuba intended to do it simultaneously with a Revolution that was redistributing the country’s wealth and resources.

The Revolution would accomplish this by relying on two techniques: government distribution systems, ranging from land reform to rationing, which guaranteed that the poor got an equal share of whatever resources there were; and popular mobilization, which increased the availability of certain kinds of services even when resources were lacking. Education and health care were two areas in which human resources could, to a certain extent, make up for the lack of material resources.

The first years of the Revolution were characterized by an ethos of voluntarism and redistribution mobilized in the service of national redemption. While some Cubans objected, and left the country, many more were inspired by the opportunity to remake their society. The literacy

42 Experiments with Socialism

campaign, the formation of mass organizations, and the reform of the health system marked this initial period of intense mobilization.

“The attack on illiteracy,” Richard Fagen explains, was “not simply a technological or pedagogical problem. It was seen as a profoundly political effort, one tied intimately to the revolutionary transformation of society and the economy.”14 Illiteracy and lack of education meant silence, marginalization, and oppression. Mass education was a key means of overturning centuries of inequality and empowering the poor. The mobi- lization of some 250,000 urban Cubans, including 100,000 students, was also a part of the project of political education, or concientización, for the urban, educated sectors of the population who had lived in relative material comfort under the old order. The campaign “vividly demonstrated a fundamental and repeatedly stated value of Cuban society – namely, that revolution equals education.” Banners throughout the country exhorted “The path up from underdevelopment is education,” and “The school plan is your responsibility.”15 The Museo Nacional de la Campaña de Alfabetización, housed in a former military complex on the outskirts of Havana, commemorates the achievements of the campaign (see Figure!2.1).

The literacy campaign, like the massive infusion of resources into education, especially for the rural poor, also invoked José Martí’s “radical ideas for rural, vocational, lyrical, and adult education.” Private schools

Figure 2.1 Literacy Museum in Ciudad Libertad outside of Havana, 2000. Source: Photo by Aviva Chomsky.

Experiments with Socialism 43

were closed, and basic, vocational, and technical education was spread to every corner of the country.16 Urban students were required to spend time working in the countryside. In the 1960s, this took the form of two" week mobilizations for agricultural labor; in the 1970s, urban high school students who wanted to follow the pre"university track were sent to rural boarding schools that combined classroom work with manual labor.

Economic and social marginalization meant that Cuba’s poor had little access to health care before the Revolution. Like wealth and educa- tion, health care was concentrated in the urban areas. In January 1960, the new government created the Rural Health Service, establishing rural health facilities and requiring every medical school graduate to spend a year doing social service work in an underserved rural area. Dental service was added in 1961.17 Like education, improving access to health care was not seen as a technical problem, but rather as a revolutionary transformation of society.

The overt hostility of Cuba’s powerful neighbor, the United States, to the revolutionary process contributed to the sense that the Revolution had to continue with a state of mobilization and alert even after the military victory. In late 1960, in the context of ongoing attacks and sabotage – which Castro called “imperialist campaigns of aggression” – the Cuban leader called for the population to “set up a system of revolutionary collective vigilance.” “When the masses are organized,” he exhorted, “there isn’t a single imperialist, or a lackey of the imperialists, or anybody who has sold out to the imperialists, who can operate.”18 The response was the creation of the CDRs or Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

“The first committees began to form almost immediately following Castro’s speech, despite the absence of official guidelines for the program,” explains Richard Fagen. “Groups of enthusiastic citizens went ahead and organized their own committees without much attention to procedural niceties. Like so many other institutions of the early years of the Revolution, the first CDR displayed more energy than order, more enthusiasm than discipline.”19

The Revolution called on everybody to participate in creating the new society. The CDRs carried out the country’s first vaccination campaign, in 1962. They supported the implementation of the Literacy Campaign. When the U.S."backed exile army invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961, the CDRs were ordered to round up counterrevolutionaries and their sympathizers. “While the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Militia were engaging the exile troops … the committees, in a frenzy of activity in the cities and towns, were reporting and rounding up persons

44 Experiments with Socialism

suspected of counterrevolutionary sentiments and behavior.”20 Although tens of thousands were detained – often on flimsy evidence – most were released when the three"day invasion was decisively defeated. The events prefigured an aspect of Cuba’s revolutionary mobilization that would be repeated over the decades: the greater the external threat to the gov- ernment and the country, the greater was the pressure exerted on the population to close ranks, refrain from criticism, and conform and obey.

By 1963, the attempt to diversify the economy by abandoning sugar production had proved disastrous. Nevertheless, the revolutionary project of redistributing the country’s resources, raising the standard of living of the poor, and popular mobilization to create a new, equal country had succeeded in bringing about fundamental social changes. Despite what looked like a downturn or failure in macroeconomic terms, things got much better for the poor.

By the mid"1960s, Cuban leaders, and their advisors, agreed that they would have to return to sugar production in order to finance the revolu- tionary transformation. But they continued to debate the shape, and the pace, of the grander economic project. Soviet advisors, and members of the Cuban Communist Party who adhered to a Soviet model, argued for Soviet"style “market socialism”: a combination of central planning and capitalist"style market incentives. Investment, and rewards in the form of wages and benefits, should reflect productive capacity. Eventually, increased production would benefit everyone.

But Che Guevara’s alternative vision, which argued for abolishing the market altogether, won out initially. According to this idea, the socialist hombre nuevo would be motivated by moral incentives rather than material reward. Voluntarism was an important part of this model, based on the success of the literacy campaign. But revolutionary mobilization would be based on decisions made from above. With sufficient revolu- tionary zeal, the impossible could be achieved.

Part of the idea of abolishing material incentives and the market was that people shouldn’t need money to get access to goods and services. The private economy was virtually eliminated. The agrarian reforms of 1959 and 1963 abolished all private farms over five caballerías (67 hectares). With the Urban Reform Law in 1960, the state took over all rental housing and set rents at no more than 10 percent of a family’s income. Between 1965 and 1967 private doctors, hospitals and clinics were brought into the new socialized medical system, so that all health care became public. And in 1968, the “revolutionary offensive” nationalized the remaining small private businesses. Pretty much everything people needed was now provided by the government, not the private sector. And

Experiments with Socialism 45

much of what the government provided was free, or heavily subsidized: health care, education, telephone service, public transportation, and day care, for example.

In return for having basic needs guaranteed, the population was expected to contribute and participate. The victory over Batista, and the early revolutionary campaigns, showed what a mobilized, committed popular effort could accomplish. Now, this kind of effort would be dedicated to building the economy. Fidel Castro summarized the need for sacrifice in a 1968 speech. “Investing in development necessarily implies not consuming everything we might consume,” he explained. “A good example for us: Our foreign exchange. If we spend it all on consumer goods and nothing on a single machine, irrigation equipment, or machinery to build drainage systems or water conservation projects, the sure result is all too clear. We would eat today, but it is certain that we wouldn’t be able to eat next year … In other words, with foreign credit we can buy bulldozers or powdered milk, one or the other.”21

Another example was the attempt to reach a 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970. The entire society was mobilized. Tens of thousands of volunteers left their jobs to cut cane. The legitimacy of the Revolution itself seemed invested in the goal.

The campaign was both a success and a failure. It was a success, in showing Cubans, and the world, people’s capacity to work, and achieve collective goals, for rewards that went beyond individualism and material gain. But it was an economic failure, in more ways than one. The harvest failed to reach 10 million tons, although at 8.5 million tons it was the largest sugar harvest in Cuba’s history. The larger failure, though, was what happened to the rest of the economy when everything was concentrated on sugar. With little investment and with labor diverted to sugar, other sectors collapsed.

The 1970s: Institutionalization and the Soviet Model

Susan Eckstein called the changes of the 1970s a “retreat to socialism.” The radical, utopian goals of the 1960s were scaled down. Juan Antonio Blanco mourns the Sovietization that occurred during this period. Socialism was in some ways reduced, as Che had warned, to “a method of! distributing goods,” or, as Vilas suggested, “a form of left"wing developmentalism.”

But the concept of Sovietization is only useful up to a point. Cuba is a Caribbean society, and even the driest bureaucrats could not erase the

46 Experiments with Socialism

pachanga inherent in Cuban culture. Political and economic structures may have been based on a Soviet model, but society and culture were still decidedly Cuban.

Furthermore, the Soviet model became associated, since the 1930s, with famine, with a huge repressive apparatus, with gulags, terror and political prisoners. Cuba may have followed the Soviet model of central- ized economic planning, but it did not create anything remotely akin to the human rights disasters that occurred in the USSR. In fact, while the “retreat to socialism” meant a return of markets and a retreat from the radical economic egalitarianism of the 1960s, it came with a growing democratization of the political sphere. Existing mass organizations took on new roles, and new institutions were created for participation.

Despite more than a decade of Sovietization, and five decades of economic blockade by the United States, the latter remained a much more decisive influence on Cuba than did the former. Cubans learned English, watched U.S. movies, and longed to visit relatives in Miami. In contrast, as one Cuban scholar described the popular response to the Soviets: “The Cubans kept their distance because of certain cultural practices, like the fact that the Russians did not use deodorant or, in the case of the women, shave their legs … Moreover, they spoke a strange and distant language, indecipherable by most Cubans no matter how much they stretched their imaginations, and they dressed as if time had stopped at some point in the past between the Yalta Conference and the end of World War II … The technology they brought was efficient and sturdy, but also wasteful and unviable, heavy and ostentatious; in other words, just too Russian.”22

Changes in the 1970s included the creation or strengthening of institutions for democratic participation, like labor unions and elected assemblies. The heady optimism and commitment that forged popular participation in the 1960s gave way to more everyday, systematic means of participation. The Cuban Revolution’s vision of democracy was quite different from U.S."style electoral democracy, but avenues for popular participation certainly existed in Cuba.

Cuba in the 1970s: How it Worked

Closer ties to the USSR and a system of economic planning based on the Soviet model characterized the 1970s. Cuba joined the COMECON in 1972, and implemented its first Five"Year Plan in 1975. Politically too, the Cuban government reorganized itself on the Soviet model. The Cuban

Experiments with Socialism 47

Communist Party, formerly sidelined because of its alliance with Batista, initial opposition to the July 26th Movement, and narrow views, had grad- ually been incorporated into the revolutionary leadership. Now it emerged as the country’s premier organization. The Party held its first Congress in 1975, and in 1976 Cuba’s government approved a new Constitution that defined the Party as “the Marxist"Leninist organized vanguard of the working class” and “the leading force in society and the State, which organizes and orients collective efforts towards the highest goals of the construction of socialism and the advance towards a communist society.”23 This meant that the Party, through its Central Committee, Political Bureau, and Secretariat, as well as periodic Party Congresses and its control of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, made and oversaw almost all important policy and economic decisions. In the words of former Political Bureau member and National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón, “the Party is the highest leadership body… the Party sets the broad outlines of national policy as decided in Party Congresses.”24

Alongside the important governing role granted to the Party, the Constitution established representative institutions called Órganos de Poder Popular — Organs of People’s Power or OPP. The population voted directly for delegates to local municipal councils, and these delegates elected representatives to the provincial and national assemblies.

Municipal Assemblies held regular open meetings with their constitu- encies about the local issues that fell under their jurisdiction, including “housing, the provision of services, the quality of education, repairs in the neighborhood.” “These issues were not minor and unimportant,” sociologist Carollee Bengelsdorf points out. However, neither were they issues that would “determine the basic direction the Cuban nation would take.”25 Assemblies held regular accountability sessions in the neighborhood to address constituents’ complaints. Although Party membership was not a requirement for serving on the municipal assemblies, some 75% of delegates tended to be Party members.26

The National Assembly was decidedly less democratic in its functioning. Although in theory the Assembly is Cuba’s legislative body, in fact, as Peter Roman explains, it “serves more as a consultative than an initiating body.” Legislative proposals generally come from the Party"run ministries and mass organizations.27

Candidates for the National Assembly were chosen by Party"controlled commissions. Virtually all were Party members. Even so, real power over major policy issues like foreign affairs and economic direction were decided upon by the Party itself, and the Council of State and Council

48 Experiments with Socialism

of! Ministers, all unelected bodies. As First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, President of the Council of State, President of the Council of Ministers, and Commander"in"Chief of the Armed Forces, Fidel Castro embodied the power of the Party in Cuba’s governing structures.

Another route for political participation was the mass organizations, created in the 1960s, but institutionalized in the Constitution. The CDRs organized people by neighborhood, while other organizations were based on gender (the FMC, Federación de Mujeres Cubanas or Federation of Cuban Women), work (the CTC, Central de Trabajadores de Cuba, or Cuban Workers Federation, the ANAP, Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños or National Association of Small Farmers, the UNEAC, Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos or National Union of Writers and Artists), or age (the UJC, Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas or Union of Young Communists). The Constitution itself suggests the contradictory role these organizations play: they “represent the specific interests” of different groups, and “incorporate them in the tasks of building, consolidating, and defending socialist society.”28 That is, they work both as ways for people to organize and make their voices heard, and as vehicles for implementation of decisions made from above.

These changes were accompanied by closer ties to the socialist bloc in the 1970s, as well as by closer links to the capitalist world. Not the United States, which maintained its economic blockade of the island. But Cuba joined the International Sugar Organization and the Latin American and Caribbean Sugar Exporters’ Association, and sold a good portion of its sugar to Western countries: 41 percent in 1974. Towards the end of the 1970s the government began to encourage foreign investment from the capitalist countries. As Eckstein explains, “sectors opened to foreign investors included tourism, light industry, medical equipment, medicine, construction, and agro"industry. Investors were promised tax"free use of land, tax exemptions on imported materials, and free repatriation of profits.” In 1982 Cuba passed a foreign investment code to guarantee the rights of investors. Eckstein argued that the opening to the West was initially a more significant factor in the economic upturn of the 1970s than was Cuba’s integration into the Soviet bloc. Falling sugar prices towards the end of the 1970s, though, made Cuba more dependent on its relationship with the Soviets.29

Sugar exports and Soviet credit – and petroleum imports – also helped to finance industrial growth. The sugar industry was increas- ingly mechanized. Cuba increased production of machinery as well as!of consumer goods. Cuban factories churned out farm machinery,

Experiments with Socialism 49

fertilizers, and pesticides, as well as ships and processing facilities for! the fishing industry, and machinery and infrastructure for nickel mining.

High sugar prices during the early 1970s contributed to the govern- ment’s ability to carry out its social goals. Significant investments in health and education, in rural electrification, and in cultural institutions meant that the population in general had a high degree of access to both material and cultural goods. Cuba’s nascent foreign aid programs, begun in the 1960s, also mushroomed in the 1970s, as the island sent large numbers of teachers, doctors, and construction workers abroad on aid missions, and lent military support to liberation movements in Angola and elsewhere in Africa.

The rationing system may have provided for the population’s basic needs, but increasing production to satisfy consumer demand was a constant challenge. Outside of the state"controlled system, black and gray markets flourished. On the “gray” market, a non"smoker, for example, might exchange cigarettes received through the ration with a friend for some other items, with no harm done to anybody. On the black market, people sold imported or scarce goods at inflated prices.

Money made an official comeback in the 1970s, to address the problem of low production and insufficient goods. The government restored some material incentives. Wages and bonuses would be linked to worker productivity, and charges were implemented for services formerly provided free by the government.

By the mid"1970s some small"scale experiments with markets were reintroduced – what political scientist Jorge Domínguez called a “gradual desocialization of minor social services.”30 These experiments reached their height in 1980 with the creation of private markets in a much more important sector: food. Private farmers, cooperatives, and state farms were authorized to sell produce directly to the public, and set their own!prices.

The idea was to add what Food First analysts Medea Benjamin and her co"authors called “a dash of capitalism” to stimulate production.31 It worked – in that the markets thrived and offered a good quality and variety of produce. But if the experiment resolved some of the problems created by socialism – lack of incentives, and low productivity – it also brought some of capitalism’s problems back. High prices meant that only some people could afford what the markets had to sell, and that sellers could make inordinate profits.

Capitalism also came into the country through an official opening to Cubans who had left for the United States. Towards the end of the

50 Experiments with Socialism

1970s the government stopped using the epithet gusano – worm – for those who had left. Émigrés were invited to visit Cuba, and allowed to shop in special dollar"only stores and bring gifts to their relatives on the island. The government even set up a system for bank transfers from abroad. All of these measures carried restrictions, though. In particular, Cubans were not allowed to have or use dollars. Gifts had to be in kind, and currency had to be deposited in the National Bank and exchanged for pesos.

Experiments with incentives that fostered inequality only went so far. The government’s commitment to equality continued to reign in other sectors, particularly in the area of health. Institutionalization in health care meant the creation of regional structures following the Soviet model. But, unlike the Soviets, the Cubans continued to invest heavily in their health system, and to emphasize primary care and community health initiatives. Cuba’s innovative and comprehensive system of polyclinics not only put accessible clinics everywhere in the country, it “projects the polyclinic’s services into the neighborhood. Not only do the physician– nurse teams attend patients in the polyclinic, but they also visit patients in their everyday environment: the home, school, day"care center, and workplace.”32 In 1984 the country implemented a new “family doctor” program – a drive to train thousands of primary care doctors and place a doctor in every neighborhood of the country. The idea was to integrate primary medical care into the community. The number of health care workers tripled between 1970 and 2005, while the number of doctors rose from “one doctor for every 1,393 people in 1970 to one doctor for every 159 people in 2005.”33

Human capital was also maximized through voluntarism and the mass organizations. Workers were asked to volunteer for “micro" brigades” to construct housing. CDRs and the FMC played a key role in the health system. “Together, they can reach into all neighborhoods of Cuba, since CDRs exist in every block and every little town,” an education official explained to Jonathan Kozol in 1976. “If an elderly person, for example, is not seen out on the street for several days, it is the obligation of the CDR to go upstairs into that person’s home and to find out if he or she is incapacitated somehow. The CDR and the FMC work in close cooperation with the Ministry of Health. Proper prenatal care depends upon the use of polyclinics, but polyclinics can be of no use to anyone if women do not recognize the need to keep appointments … If a woman fails to show up for appointments, someone from the CDR goes to her home and tries to find out what has prevented her from keeping the appointment.”34

Experiments with Socialism 51

1986: Rectification

The Rectification campaign of 1986 seemed in some ways to hark back to the early days of the Revolution. In a series of speeches Fidel decried the inequalities and privileges that had emerged as a result of the market reforms, and the loss of revolutionary idealism. Che Guevara’s ideas were resurrected. The farmers markets were closed, as were other small private businesses. Exile visits were curtailed.

Cuban sociologist Haroldo Dilla described the essence of the Rectification campaign as “characterized by a strong anti"market rheto- ric, the recovery of national autonomy (in contraposition to both the United States and Soviet perestroika), and a strong reliance on ethical and nationalist arguments that had as their emblematic figures José Martí and Che Guevara.”35

Rectification coincided with what seemed like an opposite trend in the Soviet Union: the era of glasnost and perestroika. Some analysts of the Cuban scene concluded that Cuba was reacting to the growing economic and political openness in the USSR by cracking down with a hard line.36 Others saw the Rectification campaign in more positive terms, and argued that Cuba was returning to the indigenous roots of its Revolution, rather than obediently following the Soviets down a path towards grow- ing inequality, poverty, and corruption. This was certainly how Cuba’s leaders presented the situation to the public. Still others argued that Cuba’s leaders were responding in the only way possible to a crisis caused by the falling price of sugar and increased foreign debt: they had to take steps to decrease domestic consumption and increase exports.37

The Rectification campaign did not have long to experiment, however. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 meant that the premise that had guided Cuba’s economic path at least since the middle of the 1960s – that it could rely on Soviet aid and a guaranteed market at a “fair price” in the eastern bloc for its sugar – shattered.

How Democratic was Cuban Socialism?

Cuban officials argued that their political and economic system was extraordinarily democratic. Most Western governments believed just the opposite, claiming that Cuba suffered from an extreme lack of democracy. Scholars in both countries examined the system imple- mented in the 1960s and 1970s and its evolution through the 1980s and!1990s.

52 Experiments with Socialism

“Before 1959 we had plenty of political parties, but no democracy,” Cubans like to explain. For those raised in the United States, the type of democracy that has developed in this country sometimes seems to be the only, the inevitable, or the ideal form of democracy. But democracy has in fact taken many different forms over space and time. It’s worth taking a moment to look a bit more deeply at what we mean by “democracy.”

To many Americans, the idea of socialism has become almost synony- mous with political repression, restrictions on freedom of speech and other political freedoms, arbitrary rule, and human rights violations. Censorship, repression, and gulags play a key role in how Americans view socialism.

If the July 26th Movement enjoyed almost unanimous support when it took over the country in January 1959, those supporters were far from unanimous about the direction they believed the Revolution should take. Antipathy to the old order did not necessarily mean agreement about the new. The Revolutionary Tribunals that condemned hundreds of former Batista police, army and security officers to death in the months follow- ing the Revolution received far greater condemnation abroad than in Cuba. But as the July 26th Movement consolidated its hold on power, liberals lost their initial enthusiasm for the revolutionary project. As the government expropriations of property expanded, property owners, and often their workers, were alienated. Voluntary labor, and support for the Revolution, became conditions for employment. Citizens were urged to joinmass organizations like the CDRs, the FMC, and the civilian militia. Those who doubted, hesitated, or chose not to participate found them- selves increasingly marginalized.

It was not only liberals who became disenchanted, or whose ideas were squeezed to the margins of the revolutionary project. By the early 1960s the revolutionary leadership, pressed on one side by the increasing U.S. aggression, and on the other, by the need for capable and experienced cadres to develop and run its institutions, drew closer to the country’s old Communist Party (known as the PSP from 1944–62). Recent work by Lillian Guerra shows the extent to which the PSP–paradoxically, one of the most conservative forces in the revolutionary coalition — worked to establish its place in key revolutionary institutions.38 Historic Party members tended to hold a hard line and a narrow view of what revolution could mean and could encompass. They scorned intellectual and cultural experimentation. Some of the Revolution’s most ardent supporters, like the peasants and Afro"Cubans “actively resisted the implementation of Communism as a set of economic policies and paternalistic moral mandates. They found that these clashed with their expectations for the Revolution and their identities as fidelistas.”39

Experiments with Socialism 53

The Revolution’s policies towards intellectual freedom were summa- rized by Fidel Castro in 1961 in an oft"quoted speech entitled “Words to Intellectuals.” “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing,” he said. That is, a distinction is made between intellectual work, from art to literature to academics, which opposes the Revolution, and critical or challenging work which does not oppose it – and work which opposes the Revolution is not permitted. (This is essentially the same distinction enshrined in the Cuban Constitution: “freedom of speech” may not be exercised against the Constitution, the laws of the country, or!socialism.)

This position, however, leaves much room for interpretation, and in fact the boundaries of what is considered “within the Revolution” and what is “against the Revolution” have changed considerably over time. American journalist Lee Lockwood, who spent several months traveling on the island and studying the Revolution in 1965 and 1966, was impressed that “under the loosely administered patronage of the Revolution, the arts have flourished in Cuba and remained refreshingly free of the ideological influence and restraint common to other socialist cultures.”40 In the 1970s the limits shrank considerably, and many intellectuals and ideas that had up until then been encompassed “within the Revolution” suddenly became defined as “against the Revolution” as the government became more closely aligned with the Soviet Union. Cuban intellectuals now refer to the five"year period between 1971 and 1976 as the “gray five years” because of the intense Sovietization of cultural life. “Socialist realism” as imposed during that period, explained Cuban author Ambrosio Fornet later, required a “literature as pedagogy and hagiography, aimed at developing ‘positive heroes,’ erasing any possible conflicts in the ‘bosom of the working class’.”41 The bounds started to ease after 1976 with the appointment of Armando Hart as Minister of Culture, and what has generally been seen as a “new openness” through the 1980s.42 Most intellectuals felt that the Fourth Party Congress in 1991 was an important positive step in further legitimizing debate and critical thought. Indeed, for Cuban intellectuals, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, while bringing a virtual economic collapse, also heralded an era of increased intellectual openness and debate. Chapter! 5 will explore in more depth the issue of intellectual and artistic freedom under the Revolution, while Chapters 7 and 8 will examine all of these different aspects of the Special Period.