answer all these questions

Chapter Title: Revolution and Intervention in Cuba and the Dominican Republic Book Title: Freedom Roots

Book Subtitle: Histories from the Caribbean

Book Author(s): LAURENT DUBOIS and RICHARD LEE TURITS

Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5149/9781469653624_dubois.10

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6 Revolution and Intervention in Cuba and the Dominican Republic

“ The Revolution will not be an easy task,” Fidel Castro told a cheering crowd gathered in the middle of the night on January 2, 1959, to welcome him into Santiago. His forces had seized control of the city, the country’s second larg- est; the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista was crumbling; and Cuban troops were surrendering to rebel soldiers across the country. Castro, until recently a “hunted young man” leading a small guerrilla rebellion, was suddenly the nation’s towering po liti cal figure. But Castro warned the crowd that victory was not yet at hand. There were battles still to be fought, and much was still up for grabs. “The Revolution will be a difficult undertaking, filled with risks.”1

Cuba’s previous revolutions, Castro reminded his listeners, had ultimately been stalled and reversed. And yet he exuded confidence that this new rev- olution would triumph. “Fortunately for Cuba, this time the Revolution will truly come to power. It will not be like 95 [the 1895 in de pen dence revo- lution], when the Americans came and took over and intervened at the last moment.” “It will not be like 33 [the 1933 revolution],” Castro went on, “when after the people began to believe that a revolution was taking place, Batista seized power and instituted a dictatorship.” “It will not be like 44 [the 1944 demo cratic election],” he continued, “when the multitudes were ecstatic, be- lieving that the people had come to power, at last, but it was the thieves who came to power.” This time would be dif fer ent, Castro promised. “Nei- ther thieves nor traitors, nor interventionists would control the fate of Cuba. This time, it is truly the Revolution.” Castro was anticipating, correctly, that there would be power ful re sis tance to his plans for change. But, infused with the surprising confidence that had characterized his po liti cal life since the Moncada attack, he also declared that this re sis tance would be over- come and a new Cuba would be born.2

Yet the shape of this revolution in Cuba would inevitably depend on more than the will of its leaders or even the majority of its population. Outcomes would be conditioned also by what was po liti cally pos si ble, nationally and

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internationally. What would unfold would inevitably be a dialectic between the popu lar hopes, demands, and fears inspired by the revolution; the am- bitions of its leaders; and a set of harsh international constraints imposed by U.S. reactions to change in Cuba.

Not only would Cuban history be forever transformed by the outcome of this dialectic. It would also have far- reaching consequences beyond the island, variously inspiring hopes and fears of social and economic transformation in other nations—of “another Cuba” as well as of pos si ble U.S. intervention. Those hopes and fears guided forces for change in other Ca rib bean countries as they carved out their own paths to popu lar socio- economic reforms, particularly in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Grenada, and Haiti. Though the proj ects for transformation in each of these nations would be far more moderate than the Cuban Revolution, they all nonetheless faced U.S. hostility and a debilitating mix of domestic elite and foreign opposition.

This chapter explores, first, the unfolding of the Cuban Revolution as it was shaped by a radicalizing dynamic between a mass “constituency for change” and escalating U.S. intervention to forestall it.3 Second, it illumi- nates comparable po liti cal dynamics of reform, revolution, and intervention in the neighboring in de pen dent Ca rib bean nation of the Dominican Repub- lic. In 1963, despite efforts to heed lessons from the experience of the Cu- ban Revolution, the social demo cratic government of Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic would be stopped in its tracks by a military coup and then, after Dominicans eventually rose up to restore Bosch to office, a U.S. military invasion of the island. In both Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the U.S. government turned to armed force to quash a popu lar Ca rib bean revolution that U.S. leaders did not see as being in U.S. interests. And in both cases, U.S. intervention had dreadful consequences.

Cuba’s “Vast Constituency for Radical Change”

The Cuban Revolution essentially smashed the old state, starting with its military. This opened up both opportunities and risks: there was now space for an exceptionally wide range of outcomes. A “vast constituency for radi- cal change,” writes historian Louis Pérez, seized the moment in the hopes of realizing many and varied aspirations. The revolution itself had done something that few had imagined was pos si ble a few years earlier. In the pro cess, popu lar demands expanded, and the possibility of great changes at great speed appeared on the horizon. Hundreds of thousands of ex pec tant

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citizens turned out for Castro’s hours- long speeches, surely hopeful that the revolution would live up to their dreams.4

By Pérez’s calculation, the “constituency for change” comprised some two million people out of a total population of approximately six million. First and foremost there were 1.1 million wage laborers and between some per- haps 400,000 and 665,000 unemployed workers, the number depending on the time of year given seasonal unemployment in the sugar and tourist industries. These workers rapidly mobilized to make the revolution their own. Strikes, hunger strikes, slowdowns, walkouts, and demonstrations spread like wildfire. Unions demanded a 20  percent increase in wages. Large numbers of laborers dismissed back in 1957 insisted that they be reinstated. Electric com pany employees, railway workers, paper mill la- borers, nickel miners, restaurant workers, construction laborers, and sugar workers all demanded job security and a higher standard of living. Cane cutters, the largest and prob ably worst- off labor sector, halted the harvest at twenty- one major sugar plantations, demanding wage increases from their companies.5

There were also over two hundred thousand small farming families, most of whom lived in poor conditions as squatters, tenants, and holders of small plots. This population, specifically the landless and sharecropping inhabitants of Oriente, had been central to developing and anchoring Cas- tro’s guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestra. Like wage laborers, those seeking land were not willing to wait for change from above. They sought to exploit the breakdown of the old state and the promises of “the Revolu- tion” to pursue dramatic advancements for themselves. In the countryside, poor farmers were taking over idle lands, reversing the prerevolutionary pattern of small- farming squatters being pushed off their holdings. Ten- ants also refused to pay their rents. Concerned, the new government passed a law in February threatening those who took such actions with disqualification from a future agrarian reform. But this did not stop in- stances of direct action in Oriente and elsewhere.6

Fi nally, from the first days following the revolution’s triumph, there were also demands made by Cubans of African descent to make racial justice cen- tral to the revolutionary program. They constituted between a quarter and a third of the country and comprised a disproportionately large part of the rural and urban lower classes. The politics of racial equality had been at the center of the War of In de pen dence in the 1890s, but subsequent Cuban regimes had rarely addressed the question. The 26th of July Movement it- self had been slow to call for antidiscrimination mea sures. During the early

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months after Castro’s victory, however, popu lar demands for change put questions of race and racism on the revolutionary agenda.7

Castro knew his po liti cal future depended on his being seen as respon- sive to popu lar demands. As a leader, he had to live up to the rhe toric of “the revolution.” He would succeed at doing so only by riding the waves of popu lar mobilization. The population now demanded real socioeconomic change, as Castro had long promised, not just po liti cal liberalization and civil rights. It remained to be seen how much of that change could and would be accomplished through state intervention within a cap i tal ist system based overwhelmingly on the private sector and in a country so deeply tied eco- nom ically and strategically to the United States. It also remained to be seen whether Castro’s erstwhile promises for a transition from an authoritarian to a demo cratic regime, even if not immediate, would be fulfilled.8

Some of those who had participated in the re sis tance to Batista were fighting for an essentially po liti cal revolution— the elimination of the dictatorship— but not a socioeconomic one. Castro, on the other hand, had called for a radical re distribution of wealth, though not a fully socialist or- der or a break with the United States. But when Castro faced insuperable U.S. opposition to popu lar radical reforms, both economic warfare and armed intervention, he mobilized nationalist support for just such a break and steered the country in a new geopo liti cal and ideological direction that was not rooted in either Castro’s long- standing ideals or popu lar po liti cal visions. That new direction involved a deferential alliance with the Soviet Union and a turn toward Communism, with an almost fully state- run econ- omy and a smothering set of official national ideas. Until the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990, Cuban Communism would disprove both its apologists and its detractors, creating a series of contradictory outcomes for many Cubans, both profoundly welcomed forms of egalitarian change and deeply resented state repression.

Revolutionary Reforms

Before Castro could institute the redistributive reforms that he had laid out in his 1953 speech, “History Will Absolve Me,” and that now fired the popu- lar imagination in Cuba, he had to establish a new government and refash- ion the state. As had been planned by the 26th of July Movement and agreed to by other opposition groups, Castro appointed Judge Manuel Urrutia pro- visional president. The new prime minister was José Miró Cardona, the president of the Havana Bar Association who, like Urrutia, had been a centrist

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opponent of Batista. These appointments gave the provisional government a moderate image, and it was immediately recognized by the United States. The creation of a new “ministry for revolutionary laws,” however, hinted that some of the revolutionary laws decreeing dramatic re distribution of wealth outlined in History Will Absolve Me might be on their way.9

Castro, meanwhile, was appointed the nation’s new commander- in- chief. It was unclear how much real control Urrutia and Miró could exercise in the shadow of this fantastically popu lar figure. New York Times correspon- dent Herbert Matthews wrote that Castro was now, in fact, “the chief power in Cuba.” Urrutia’s swearing in had been almost a nonevent, eclipsed by a dramatic march by Castro and his troops five hundred miles across the is- land from the east, where the insurgency had raged, to the capital after the triumph of the revolution. Castro drove slowly atop a tank from Santiago, delivering long speeches to jubilant crowds as if he were campaigning for office. Castro’s po liti cal skills were on full display. He could have taken a plane to Havana. Instead he turned the voyage to Havana into a weeklong triumphant pro cession. Castro was drawing the population into the revolu- tionary strug gle, directly and through mass media. In Havana, he was wel- comed with a mass rally. An awed British ambassador described the image Castro projected as a “mixture of José Martí, Robin Hood, Garibaldi, and Jesus Christ.”10

Despite the moderate and respectable image lent to the new government by its president and prime minister, it immediately swung open the doors to deep socioeconomic transformation in two key ways. First, all agreed that elections would not take place for eigh teen months. Until that time, the un- elected government could exercise absolute authority, with the cabinet en- dowed with legislative power. “Revolution first, elections later” was the official slogan.11

Elections appeared to be of little popu lar concern as well. President Ur- rutia noted how the audience booed when Castro mentioned government elections in one of his speeches, and this phenomenon was echoed at future rallies. Repeated promises to reduce poverty and in equality by demo- cratically elected presidents in the past had never been fulfilled. They were unable or unwilling to overcome opposition by power ful groups to popu lar socioeconomic reforms. And Cuba’s at least nominally liberal state had long been characterized by massive graft and embezzlement, po liti cal vio lence, government neglect, and often authoritarian rule. Perhaps elections simply were not a priority for most Cubans in this context or not a serious concern given Castro’s popularity and widespread optimism about the future of the

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revolution. Furthermore, liberal democracy is slow by design while a rev- olutionary change is fast by definition. Many perhaps instinctively under- stood this and longed for the latter. The government’s absolute rule was solidified when in mid- February Prime Minister Miró resigned and recom- mended that Castro take over his position. It was clear that Castro was the real power behind the throne anyway. “I resigned. Cuba did not protest; it accepted, it applauded,” Miró noted.12

The second and perhaps most impor tant step taken by the new govern- ment making revolutionary change was the immediate elimination of the old Cuban military structure. On January 13, it was announced that the Cu- ban military would be replaced by a new one or ga nized by Castro. In the place of armed forces with deep ties to the U.S. government, Castro estab- lished a military that was ideologically committed to the revolution even in the face of pos si ble threats of U.S. intervention. The most effective means U.S. leaders and power ful Cuban groups had for guaranteeing policies fa- vorable to their interests in the Cuban republic suddenly vanished before their eyes.13

The new regime also swiftly set up tribunals to try members of the old armed forces alleged to have committed war crimes and atrocities. Hun- dreds, prob ably thousands, of Cubans had been tortured and killed by the armed forces and security organ izations during the 1950s. Now hundreds of Batista’s military, police, and security forces were found guilty of capital crimes and executed in the early months of 1959. The decision to sentence to death many from the regime’s repressive apparatus was popu lar in Cuba. According to one in de pen dent survey, 93  percent of those polled supported the executions. Accounts of the trials suggest that in most cases there was some facsimile of legality that made these more than pure theater but far short of due pro cess. Most observers, though, including critics of the trials, concluded that the defendants were prob ably guilty as charged.14

With the old army gone and the foundations for a new state in place, Cas- tro began making good on the redistributionist reforms he had envisioned six years earlier in History Will Absolve Me. Even without the promised elections, Castro appears to have sustained his popularity with these re- forms. The first step was the Urban Reform Law of March 1959. As prom- ised, all rents were reduced by between 30 and 50  percent (depending on their cost). The law also required that all vacant urban lots be sold to any- one prepared to build a home or to the government so they could be used to construct low- income public housing. Unsurprisingly, the Urban Reform Law was a popu lar mea sure. Other similar mea sures followed at a fever

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pitch. By April, Hugh Thomas contends, “national income had been seri- ously and visibly redistributed.” It was a “remarkable po liti cal achieve- ment” that gave “a large section of the populace a big stake in the Revolution.” Utility rates, bus fares, and medicine prices were all reduced. As a result of labor activism and the presence of a pro- labor government, wages began rising substantially across the board, including a 15  percent increase in wages for all cane cutters. Government employees’ salaries were also raised. New schools and hospitals were built at a dizzying rate from the first months of the new regime, expanding the availability of pub- lic health care and education across the country. Needless to say, these dramatic improvements in the standard of living of the popu lar classes, and the reduction in income in equality, came at the expense of landlords, employers, and large landowners. They voiced vehement opposition to a government many of them now labeled “Communist.” The  U.S.- owned telephone and electric companies also protested the government’s re- quired rate reductions.15

The “Revolutionary Government,” as it called itself, also sought to chal- lenge the country’s structures of racial discrimination and de facto segre- gation. In March 1959, Castro devoted a major part of one of his speeches to condemning racism in Cuba. Until this time, Cubans of African descent had been excluded from many private schools, social clubs, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and even parts of public parks and other public spaces. They were effectively barred from employment in certain branches of the economy, such as retail stores and banking, and in companies where hiring practices were determined by nepotistic white- only unions. Racial preju- dice and exclusion in social networks were pre sent not just among elite white Cubans but across class. Railway and electrical workers, for instance, had clubs that banned Cubans of African descent. Earlier legal changes had not stopped these practices: the 1940 Constitution explic itly banned racial discrimination, and subsequent government decrees had affirmed this princi ple.16

The new Cuban regime took immediate and effective steps to counter dis- crimination, first in recreational spaces, soon afterward in education, and then in the realm of employment. Town parks that had been informally seg- regated were rebuilt so that their “traditional, racially significant layouts” were wiped out. In one case, historian Alejandro de la Fuente explains, “the old flowerpots that had divided the white and black areas were removed and replaced with an undivided walkway.” The country’s beaches had pre- viously been segregated, with the most desirable ones in private hands,

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owned by “openly discriminatory” social clubs or luxury hotels. Castro re- solved the issue in one simple decree that made all beach property public. He also instituted mea sures to end racist practices in hotels, restaurants, and other public spaces. The “racial integration of previously white social spaces marked one of the starkest distinctions between pre- and post-1959 Cuba,” writes historian Devyn Spence Benson. Castro had rarely spoken about racism during the insurrection. But in the immediate aftermath of the revolution’s triumph, Afro- Cuban leaders demanded forceful anti- racist mea sures that help explain the Cuban government’s immediate attention to race. That included “a fruitful and unpre ce dented public debate,” in de la Fuente’s words, over how to address the prob lem of racism in Cuba. People of color were roughly 30  percent of the population, and Castro acted to mo- bilize this demographic as part of the revolution and its base of support.17

Yet there was also strong white re sis tance to these revolutionary efforts to end racial segregation and discrimination. Some white Cubans expressed opposition even to sitting next to Cubans of color in public transportation, walking in the park in the same zones, being in the same labor clubs, and having their children attend the same schools. Given Castro’s popularity at the time, it was a sign of the severity of racial in equality and prejudice in Cuba that he encountered many antagonistic responses among white Cu- bans to his March 1959 speech against racism. One better- off white Cuban recalled that “Many people left Cuba because they did not want to mix with [Cubans of color].” Opponents of the perceived radicalization of the revolu- tion publicly brandished the racist slogan “Neither Black nor Red.”18

It would take many years before quality of life and life chances across race began to equalize in Cuba, and the disappearance of some forms of rac- ism would not mean the end of others. Antiblack prejudice continued among whites in, for instance, the criminal justice system. Also after the initial years of the revolution, critiques of racism would be smothered by an official dis- course of supposed revolutionary triumph over racial discrimination and prejudice. Race- based organ izations and expressions of black consciousness were repressed, even though, in contrast to white- only institutions, black organ izations’ aim had always been to help end, provide refuge from, and triumph over racism. In these ways, some of the government’s own policies helped certain forms of racism continue to prevail, even as racial in equality and discrimination was dramatically reduced in key spheres— health, edu- cation, and access to the professions— over the next two de cades.19

In the aftermath of the revolution, the new government also sought to implement a national agrarian reform. Since its beginnings, the 26th of July

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Movement had made the promise of agrarian reform a centerpiece of its po- liti cal platform. The movement had depended on the support of squatters, tenants, and other small farmers in Oriente, who had helped shape the prac- tice and ideology of the guerrilla forces during their years in the Sierra Maestra and Sierra del Cristal. Now that they were in power, the revolu- tionary leaders were determined to do what they had said they would.

On May 17, the regime announced its agrarian reform law, which pro- hibited property holdings in excess of 1,000 acres or beyond 3,333 acres for sugar, rice, or cattle estates that were being productively exploited. Com- pared with other agrarian reform policies, such as that in Puerto Rico in 1941 and Guatemala in 1952, these property limits were actually high and far from radical. But given the tremendous magnitude and overall dimen- sions of Cuba’s sugar and cattle estates, the law would have an enormous impact. The gargantuan fifty- thousand acre, U.S.- owned Pingree Ranch in Oriente would be almost entirely taken over by the government. And alto- gether an estimated 2.5 million acres of ranch land and 1.5 million acres from U.S. sugar estates were targeted for expropriation in the months after the law went into effect. Ultimately the law would subject three million acres of U.S. sugar properties and two million acres of Cuban- owned estates to expropriation and potential re distribution.20

The agrarian reform also banned sharecropping. All those farming on land belonging to others (or the state) were to be given the area that they were already cultivating, provided it was no more than sixty- seven acres. Furthermore, confiscated property could be distributed to individual farm- ers in plots up to sixty- seven acres. Among the beneficiaries who were to receive individual land, priority was to be given first to landless peasants in the area where the land was expropriated, second to wage laborers in the area, third to peasants from other parts of the country, and fourth to workers in other areas.21

The agrarian reform law promised land not only to sharecroppers and landless peasants and workers but also to some of Cuba’s farmers known as colonos. Much sugar production in Cuba took place under a system dating back to the 1880s in which colonos produced cane on land generally leased or granted to them by foreign and Cuban corporate sugar refiners and under contract to sell the cane to those refiners at agreed- upon terms. (Colonos, though, comprised not only small- to- medium scale farmers on a mill’s land but also large planters who might own their own estate.) One year after the new law’s promulgation, lands held or leased by colonos, but legally belonging to the refiners were expropriated and given to the colonos

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236 Chapter Six

themselves. Areas expropriated from the mills might also be redistrib- uted to squatters, sharecroppers, and tenants on the property. Fi nally, the agrarian reform law placed limits on foreign land purchases in the future.22

The agrarian reform law also included a major provision that went in a dif fer ent direction. The law provided for the use of confiscated land for the formation of “agricultural cooperatives” under state direction. The term “cooperative” was misleading. The workers there would be employed by the state and a man ag er appointed to oversee their labor. This formal employ- ment represented an improvement for workers, most of whom had previ- ously labored as cane cutters and were laid off half the year during sugar’s dead season. Now, they would be employed year- round. But although in the- ory workers were to receive a cut of any profits made, the vast majority of the cooperatives’ earnings were to go to the state to develop roads, schools, and housing. One observer aptly called these new institutions “pseudo co- operatives,” and soon they would be formally turned into state farms.23

Castro explained the decision to use confiscated land to create coopera- tives, rather than giving it to individuals to set up farms, to the U.S. ambas- sador. “Distribution of land into very small parcels,” he explained, “would be ruinous to production and government aimed rather at establishment of cooperatives of reasonable economic size.” Neither sugar cultivation nor cattle raising lends itself to profitable small farming, so if production in these areas was to be maintained, there had to be a way of preserving large landholdings. The advantages to the new state were clear, since revenues from the cooperatives flowed into their coffers directly. Ultimately, the “ag- ricultural cooperatives” were a profound, unanticipated, and controversial innovation that would move Cuba in a state socialist direction, with the gov- ernment playing a major new role in agricultural production. Nearly 160,000 rural families— certainly a substantial number— did gain either full title or free access to land thanks to the agrarian reform. But overall the government sustained the plantation structure after the revolution, though now with a large portion of the country’s plantations under state control.24

The shape given to this land reform meant that the number of agricul- tural laborers who had the opportunity to become in de pen dent farmers was far more limited than it might have been. The government at the time jus- tified this by arguing that there was no great desire for land among Cuba’s wage laborers and that the state- run cooperatives in fact offered an attrac- tive alternative to low- income jobs, underemployment, and unemployment. For many, this may have been the case given the potential challenges of switching to new work, pos si ble relocation, and a somewhat dif fer ent way

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of life. But for others the autonomy of small farming was an appealing pros- pect. And despite the limited availability of land for wage laborers, some were able to make the choice to become in de pen dent farmers through the reform. Data from eleven rural areas show a substantial drop in the num- ber of agricultural laborers and a notable jump in the number of farmers between 1957 and 1966. This suggests desire among a significant group to access land as a way of opting for in de pen dent farming rather than wage labor, even under the improved conditions offered by the government.25

The agrarian reform was controversial within Cuba, particularly because it hurt large landowners in the country. Still, it appears to have been quite popu lar. A public opinion poll in June 1959, after the law had been promul- gated, indicated that Castro had a nearly 80  percent approval rating (though there was some fretting in his cabinet that this was down from around 90  percent in February). In August the U.S. ambassador explained, “The Castro regime seems to have sprung from a deep and widespread dissatis- faction with social and economic conditions,” responding “to an overwhelm- ing demand for change and reform.” “The universal support it has received from the humble and the lower middle classes” is evidence of this. Acknowl- edgment of popu lar backing for the government, though, did not cause U.S. leaders to question their implacable opposition to it or to consider com- promise. The agrarian reform policy, in par tic u lar, had an immediate in- ternational effect, provoking an escalating and ultimately insuperable conflict between the island and the superpower ninety miles away.26

Agrarian Reform and the United States: “The Rubicon”

In the spring of 1959, Castro set out to tackle an urgent issue: how the United States would react to his new regime. Always attentive to the im- portance of media repre sen ta tions, in April he took an “unofficial” trip to the United States hosted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He hoped to get the U.S. public on his side and to offset a growing hostility from U.S. investors and the foreign policy establishment toward the Cuban gov- ernment’s escalating populist and nationalist policies. Although the U.S. State Department was divided on its policy toward Cuba in the immediate months after the revolution, as early as March 1959 some officials began calling for action against the “Communist” regime and the dangerous pre- ce dent it was supposedly setting for other nations in the hemi sphere. Cas- tro’s trip was a charm offensive. He delivered long speeches to cheering crowds. An estimated ten thousand appeared at his Harvard University

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speech and around thirty- five thousand in New York City’s Central Park. He gave interviews on the Sunday tele vi sion talk shows, including Meet the Press. “It seems obvious,” the New York Times wrote about his visit, “that Americans feel better about Fidel Castro than they did before.”27

It was prob ably no coincidence that Castro’s trip to the United States pre- ceded the Cuban government’s announcement of its agrarian reform. Given the severity of rural in equality in Cuba, the reform inevitably involved a major re distribution of property, including that held by vast U.S. estates. While U.S. firms were less dominant in the sugar industry than they had been in the 1930s, they still controlled 40  percent of the production, includ- ing seven out of the ten largest estates. This was an im mense U.S. invest- ment, accounting for almost half of all U.S. agricultural interests in Latin Amer i ca. Cuba had more per capita U.S. investment than any other coun- try in the region. U.S. investors were predictably enraged by the agrarian reform. Unfortunately, Castro’s efforts to win over portions of the U.S. pub- lic did nothing to dissuade U.S. business interests and the U.S. government from forcefully opposing the new policy.28

The agrarian reform law affirmed the “constitutional right of owners af- fected by this Law to receive compensation for their expropriated proper- ties.” That compensation would be based on the 1958 assessed tax value of the land, as well as the buildings and other improvements on it. Given the Cuban government’s financial constraints, however, the compensation would come in the form of twenty- year government bonds earning an an- nual interest rate of up to 4.5  percent, a competitive rate at the time. This was similar compensation to that granted in agrarian reforms elsewhere, such as that carried out by the United States in Japan after World War II.29

Just two weeks after the agrarian reform law had been announced in mid- May, a se nior U.S. State Department official asked the U.S. ambassa- dor in Havana, Philip Bonsal, to share its objections to the law with Castro. U.S. investors were being “unfavorably affected” by “compensation provi- sions” that were “inadequate” both in terms of the “valuation” of property and how the compensation was to be paid out. The State Department also immediately issued an open statement to the Cuban government. While it “recognize[d]” Cuba’s “right to take property within its jurisdiction for public purposes,” it emphasized there was a “corresponding obligation” for compensation that was “prompt” and “adequate.” Castro met with the U.S. ambassador the next day and stood his ground. Cuba was “not disposed to quibble over 20, 30 or 40 million pesos,” he explained, and was “confident difficulties could be negotiated” regarding compensation. But, he made

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clear, the “government lacked resources to pay promptly in cash.” And “land reform could not wait.” It was “a matter of life or death.”30

The  U.S. government’s insistence on immediate cash payments for ap- propriated lands was, in a way, disingenuous. U.S. leaders were demand- ing from the Cuban state something that it could not deliver, and they prob ably understood this. The real target, it seems, was the policy of agrar- ian reform itself. At seemingly every opportunity, U.S. leaders made clear to Cuban officials that the reform— the extent of it and the terms of compensation— had crossed a red line that the U.S. government would not accept from its erstwhile dutiful, investment- friendly, and controllable ally next door. Fifty years later Raúl Castro would note, “The 1959 land reform was the Rubicon of our revolution— a death sentence for our U.S. relations.”31

U.S. overseas investors protested the agrarian reform law ever more forcefully and deemed it a menacing example of Communism. They took advantage of impressive po liti cal access and found much sympathy among Washington’s leaders. They provided them, too, with a Cold War narrative to justify actions on behalf of corporate self- interest. After the Texas cattle rancher Robert Kleberg had his property taken from him by the Cuban gov- ernment, he protested to U.S. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson. The agrarian reform was a “Communist effort to block the flow of American capital to all Latin- America, create eventual chaos and soften the hemi- sphere for Communism.” Kleberg proposed that the United States retaliate by suspending Cuba’s sugar quota, thereby strangling the island eco nom- ically, until either the agrarian reform was revoked or Castro’s government fell. Kleberg well understood the economic power the U.S. government had over Cuba. The U.S. system of sugar quotas offered preferential and pro- tected prices up to a certain level of imports. Almost three- quarters of the United States’ entire foreign sugar quota was granted to Cuba. The sugar industry in Cuba employed approximately one- third of all Cuba’s wage la- borers, roughly half a million, and constituted 80  percent of Cuban export earnings. So Cuba was utterly dependent on the United States purchasing its sugar, with an economy highly dependent on foreign trade. In mid-1959, government leaders in the United States considered ending importation of Cuban sugar too aggressive a step, understanding that it would make it vir- tually impossible to return to normal relations. But the lobbying by U.S. companies laid the groundwork for what was to come.32

The U.S. government also had significant strategic concerns about the hemispheric, and global, implications of the Cuban Revolution. It had tri- umphed at a pivotal moment in the development of the Cold War, which

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made the stakes involved in the U.S.- Cuba relationship seem particularly significant to many in the United States. Members of the U.S. Congress re- ported that they were put into a state of “shock” when they heard that the new Cuban government “planned to be neutral” in the Cold War. As early as January 13, 1959, Castro had proclaimed Cuba’s nonalignment in the con- flict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Like Árbenz in Guate- mala five years earlier, Castro embraced a position of being neither pro- nor anti- Communist. Membership in the Communist party would be neither il- legal nor grounds for exclusion from jobs and positions in the government. This went against the demands the United States was making of Cuba and other countries in Latin Amer i ca in this period.33

Cuba’s Communist party had functioned for de cades in Cuba as a reform- ist and pragmatic left- wing organ ization seeking, for the time being, broad po liti cal and labor alliances rather than a revolution to establish a one- party state in the name of socialism (notwithstanding the Cuban Communist par- ty’s links to a totalitarian, anti capitalist state— the Soviet Union). That ori- entation helps explain the party’s alliance in the late 1930s and early 1940s with the then also reformist Batista. But that was a very dif fer ent time in U.S.- Soviet relations, and the United States was now imposing new Cold War rules. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, the Soviet Union was becoming more aggressive globally. Countries throughout Africa, Asia, and the Ca rib- bean were moving toward decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. And the rival powers of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China were now all competing for influence, standing, and alliances in these newly in de pen- dent countries— what people had begun calling the “Third World.” A neu- tral Cuba had always been unacceptable to U.S. leaders, but was even more so in the context of the Cold War and the perilous superpower rivalry for dutiful allies. Cuba’s sudden move toward nonalignment and its alarming in de pen dence in the international arena were quickly on display. In 1959, the Cuban representative at the United Nations voted at odds with the United States thirty- nine times.34

U.S. attacks on Cuba and its agrarian reform had a divisive and ultimately radicalizing impact on the revolution. What remained of the alliance be- tween the more conservative and more left- wing revolutionaries was torn apart. It is revealing that this split did not happen at the time the agrarian reform was passed, but rather two months later, following the official pro- test by the U.S. government. Many centrist revolutionaries had been am- bivalent about the agrarian reform as a domestic policy to begin with. But

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now that the reform clearly had potentially devastating consequences for Cuban trade and relations with the United States, centrists were even less willing to support it and to remain in the government. Within just six months the Cuban Revolution had been transformed, at once leaving behind and being abandoned by its conservative wing.

Still, the future course of Cuban history remained far from clear. The Cu- ban Revolution had not issued an attack against the princi ple of private property or promoted a broad program of state owner ship of the means of production. At the time Cuba also had no formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The Cuban Revolution still appeared to many to be closer to the Mexican Revolution under Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s— with its sweeping agrarian and nationalist, but cap i tal ist, reforms— than to the Rus sian and Chinese revolutions. A major egalitarian transformation of the economy and society had already taken place in Cuba. It had hurt the upper and upper- middle classes, the landowners, the landlords, and employers in general. Nonetheless, private enterprise remained a major part of the economy, enough so that some well- off Cubans were still will- ing to make peace with the revolution, given the hope and excitement it had inspired among Cubans at large, including some of their children.35

The U.S. government, though, was not willing to make peace. This was the U.S. quasi- colony of Cuba during the Cold War administration of Dwight Eisenhower, not the far more formidable and in de pen dent nation of Mexico amid the transformative Depression- era presidency of Franklin Roo se velt. The situation in Cuba at this time found more parallels with soon- to- be- overthrown Guatemala in 1954. In October 1959, Assistant Secretary Rubottom wrote up a policy statement representing the views of the State Department leadership regarding the need for “a change in the Cuban re- gime.” As he later recalled, as early as June 1959, “we had reached the de- cision that it was not pos si ble to achieve our objectives with Castro in power,” and by July and August, the State Department was “busy drawing up a program to replace” him. Cuba’s economic policies were unacceptable, for they were “directly affecting adversely the rights of United States inves- tors in Cuba.” Furthermore, they had “a distinctly statist and nationalist orientation which, if also adopted by other Latin American countries, would seriously undermine our economic policies and objectives with re spect to the Latin American region.” Rubottom recognized that Castro retained “a great popu lar following in Cuba” because of the way he had “tapped and crystalized the more humble Cuban’s aspirations.” He therefore advocated

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242 Chapter Six

against open U.S. intervention to force a “change in the Cuban Govern- ment.” U.S. opposition would instead be channeled toward covert support for Cuban exiles and others willing to fight against the Cuban government.36

The CIA began to or ga nize a covert paramilitary Cuban exile force to in- vade the island and, it was initially hoped, to spearhead an armed move- ment to overthrow the Cuban government. To do so, CIA officials turned to a community of anti government Cuban exiles in the United States, includ- ing members of Batista’s old repressive apparatus. They had been the first to leave Cuba for South Florida, but they were soon followed by large num- bers from the business and landowning classes along with professionals and skilled workers— typically white, well educated, high income, and urban. Miami was familiar to many of these mi grants from before the time of the revolution. Over the first few years after the 1959 revolution, tens of thousands— around 135,000 by April  1961 and nearly 250,000 by Octo- ber  1962— arrived in Miami not to frolic or relax, as before, but as mi- grants. That was not how they saw themselves, however. Many imagined that the Castro regime would soon be overthrown with the help of the U.S. government and that they would then be able to return, reclaim their prop- erty, and resume their old lives.37

Popu lar Support for the Revolution

The exodus of those groups that were most hurt or threatened by the revo- lutionary transformation of Cuba provided opportunities to or ga nize a movement and launch armed attacks from abroad to try to undermine the new government. But it also significantly reduced the size of the minority within Cuba that was opposed to the government. That said, there was nonetheless notable re sis tance on the island from the beginning. Some of the cycle of po liti cal repression and violent re sis tance that had shaped Cuban politics for the previous years began again, though now with oppos- ing parties playing reversed roles. Denied the demo cratic means of a free press, civil rights, and elections by the government, making it no dif fer ent from the Batista dictatorship in this re spect, the minority that opposed the government turned to armed re sis tance. An estimated one thousand urban guerrillas or ga nized acts of sabotage against mass transportation, infra- structure, commercial stores, plantations, and oil refineries. Po liti cal oppo- nents of the new regime were subject to brutal repression. U.S. officials guessed that “anywhere between 4,000 and 8,000” opponents were impris- oned by April 1960.38

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In 1960, there were also between 1,000 and 1,200 rural rebels who had taken up arms in the region of Escambray. Many of these opponents were not initially counterrevolutionary, but they now feared that the emphasis on cooperatives in the agrarian reform would take pre ce dence over award- ing property to small farmers, former squatters, tenants, and colonos. But, as the CIA wrote in February 1961, the Escambray guerrillas were “unable to conduct effective operations” and were not a significant threat to the re- gime. Later in 1963, the regime would also have to suppress a serious rural rebellion in Matanzas led by prosperous farmers driven by fears of state expropriation of their properties—seizures demanded by some of their workers and justified by owners’ putative counterrevolutionary collabora- tion. The central government itself denounced local officials’ “despotism” against landowners at that time.39

Throughout its early years, then, the regime faced opponents, but they were far outnumbered by those then backing the government. CIA analysts and the U.S. ambassador recognized this po liti cal real ity. In 1960, the CIA estimated that some two- thirds of the population remained behind Castro. His charismatic leadership played a role in this. But historical and struc- tural factors were key. The po liti cal institutions of the old, ever- failing lib- eral state, with governing parties and a press seen as corrupt and in effec tive, had little popu lar standing that could serve as a counterpoint to the drive for rapid social and economic change. Furthermore, Cuba’s social structure was such that there were few large groups predisposed to resist the increas- ingly socialist economy. In contrast to the Dominican Republic, this was not a land predominantly of small and medium- sized farmers with long- standing traditions of and attachments to individual property in land, but rather a nation of low- income wage laborers. (Escambray’s comparatively high numbers of small property owners made it exceptional.) It’s certain that most of the some 160,000 squatting, sharecropping, and tenant farm- ers and their families, who now had secured free legal access to the land that they were using through the agrarian reform, felt some loyalty to the revolutionary government. Thanks to other economic reforms, Cubans also now paid no rents (only amortization), owed half as much for phone and utilities rates, and received higher wages. This was indeed a welcome revo- lution for many, albeit not for others.40

The revolution also had transformative dimensions for many of the indi- viduals involved, who felt they were part of something larger than them- selves. It excited youthful hopes for a new and better world fi nally replacing an old and unregenerate one, a sense that “we can do the impossible.”

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A  massive literacy campaign in 1961, for instance, mobilized hundreds of thousands of idealistic students and other volunteers and was remarkably successful. The campaign brought literacy to as many as seven hundred thousand Cubans, and by 1962, Cuba claimed that already 96  percent of the population was functionally literate. The campaign’s impact was felt by teachers as well as students. Most of the teachers were white, from Ha- vana, and often relatively well off. On the other hand, most who were taught lived in Oriente, where literacy was abysmally low, poverty wide- spread, and the population mostly of African descent.41

Over half of the participants in the literacy campaign were female, and a large number were teen agers. The months of teaching literacy in unknown parts of the country were a new experience for many. For female partici- pants, it was an exceptional opportunity to participate equally with male Cubans in “a monumental change,” as one then sixteen- year- old later re- called. Although far more modestly than in terms of class and race, the rev- olution was disrupting traditional gender norms, perhaps most obviously through the incorporation of women into the country’s mass militia, as Ba- yard de Volo writes, “dressed like men and carry ing guns.” 42

By the early 1960s, the left wing of the Cuban Revolution had prevailed within the new government, and Castro’s regime was carry ing out a major re distribution of wealth of the kind promised in his 1953 programmatic speech “History Will Absolve Me.” But the promise of liberal democracy after that transformation was in place fell by the wayside. In a May Day speech in 1960, Castro offered, instead, a dif fer ent vision of “democracy,” one defined by socioeconomic rights, material well- being, and racial and gender equality. “This is democracy, where you, worker, are guaranteed the right to work, so that you cannot be thrown out on the streets to go hun- gry.” A real democracy, Castro argued, was a place where students, whether rich or poor, all “have the opportunity to win a university degree,” where the children of workers, farmers, or “any other humble family” had “a school where you can be taught,” and where the el derly “have sustenance guaran- teed.” It was a place “where you, Black Cuban, have the right to work with- out anybody being able to deprive you of that right because of stupid prejudice,” and one “where the women acquire rights equal to those of all other citizens and have a right even to bear arms alongside the men to de- fend the country.” “Democracy,” Castro insisted, “is that form of govern- ment in which the interests of the majority are defended.” 43

In his speech on democracy, Castro did not explain why a government that defended the interests of the majority, that is, one for the people, could

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not also be of the people. He did not explain why he was not going to hold elections and run for office himself, even though he surely would have won and doing so would have helped legitimate his rule. We can, though, assume that Castro did not want to share or limit his power or lose it at some point in the future. He also no doubt feared that the checks and balances between dif fer ent branches of government that characterize liberal systems would have made the changes he promised difficult to enact quickly, or possibly to enact at all. Even if they were supported by the majority of Cubans, re- forms would also have to overcome the disproportionate po liti cal influence of the wealthy.

Meanwhile, the Cuban population overall was not clamoring for elec- tions. This surely stemmed in part from the widespread enthusiasm for the government’s policies and perhaps vague expectations that at some point in the future there would be elections. But there were other pos si ble factors at work. Cuba’s past demo cratically elected leaders— prior to Batista’s 1950s dictatorship— had been either unwilling or unable to follow through on promised socioeconomic reforms, even during the 1940s presidency of the once revolutionary leader Ramón Grau San Martín. It is understandable if this history had engendered considerable cynicism about electoral democ- racy’s prospects. Cubans doubtless also suspected that these failures were, in part, tied to imperial constraints imposed by the superpower to the north, which had helped shape Cuban governments that, even if elected, were somewhat divorced from their own people. Castro’s speech on democracy surely gave voice to ordinary Cubans’ popu lar frustrations with the past fail- ures and limitations of liberal democracy on their island and their desire to overcome them.

Castro also seemed to discount civil rights in this speech: “They spoke to you of civil rights,” he told his audience. “In that situation of civil rights your child could die of hunger before the unconcerned glance of the gov- ernment. Your child could be left without learning to read or write a sin- gle letter.” He almost suggested here that Cubans had to make a choice between emphasizing new substantive rights, such as good health care and education for all, and traditional civil rights guaranteeing freedom of speech, religion, and so forth, matters of par tic u lar concern to po liti cal or social minorities. Castro did not acknowledge, or try to forestall any of the perils of not choosing a liberal demo cratic path; that is, threats to and oppression of intellectual, economic, sexual, and other minorities. At this point, it was most obvious to large property owners that their rights were under attack. But the perils of Castro’s illiberal system would soon

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246 Chapter Six

become a real ity also for a growing number of people who did not conform to the norms of the majority or loudly applaud those of the revolution.44

Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union

Castro had quashed the potential for liberal democracy in Cuba after the revolution, and he managed to do so without losing the loyalty of the major- ity of Cubans at the time Liberal democracy would thus not impose any con- straints either upon rapid socioeconomic transformation or to the regime’s continuing rule. But U.S. opposition to Cuba’s domestic policy reforms, along with Cuba’s “neutralist” foreign policy, now threatened the new regime, most obviously its economy. At any time the U.S. government could stop importing Cuban sugar; trade on which the Cuban economy entirely de- pended. There was no alternative market for Cuba’s sugar, and without one, Cuba would remain hopelessly vulnerable to U.S. economic warfare.

In the summer of 1959, serving as Cuba’s commercial attaché, Ernesto (Che) Guevara began informal discussions with several Soviet ambassadors around the world, lobbying for the possibility of Soviet trade and aid. These discussions had a clear goal: to lay the groundwork for a potential Cuban countermove in its brewing conflict with the U.S. government. If the United States did decide to curtail its sugar purchases from and exports to Cuba in retaliation for the agrarian reform, the U.S.S.R. could buy Cuba’s cane and thus prevent an other wise seemingly unsustainable blow to the island’s economy. Of course, to take such a step would deepen the conflict with the United States.45

Aware of its military vulnerability to the United States, the Cuban gov- ernment also acted to boost its defense capabilities, reaching out to Eu ro- pean nations to purchase arms. But the U.S. government had exerted pressure on Western Eu ro pean nations not to sell weapons to Havana. So it was welcome news to the Cuban government when, after much hesitation among Soviet officials, Premier Nikita Khrushchev de cided in late Septem- ber 1959 to let Poland secretly sell a small amount of arms to Cuba. This was a first, significant gesture of support for this exciting but still po liti cally inscrutable revolution from the Rus sians. A Soviet official, Aleksandr Alek- seev, was sent to Havana in October to gather information about the regime. As he later recalled, Moscow at that time had no sense of “what kind of revo- lution this was . . .  [or] where it was going.” 46

In early 1960, bombing raids on the island by Cuban exiles were escalat- ing. Four or five times a week, their planes flew over the island and dropped

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incendiary bombs throughout the country. Meanwhile, Vice President Richard Nixon warned Castro that harm to U.S. investments in Cuba might provoke an end to U.S. sugar imports from the island. In this context, Cas- tro expressed his fears to Soviet officials that the U.S. government could strangle the revolution eco nom ically at any time. When Soviet minister Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba in February offering a trade deal between the two nations, Castro accepted the deal even though it meant selling Cu- ban sugar at only half the price at which it was then being purchased by the United States. Despite its poor terms, the trade deal sent a power ful message to Washington: Cuba might have a trump card to play if the United States cut off the sugar quota or escalated military aggression. According to CIA chief Allen Dulles, when Mikoyan delivered a speech on the virtues of the new trade deal to Cuban farmers, the audience called for Soviet “guns and planes too.” On March 3, Castro asked Alekseev, the Soviet in- telligence officer in Havana, whether Cuba could secure “the help of the USSR with supplies of goods and weapons in case of a blockade or inter- vention” by the United States. Although Castro was looking for a Soviet backstop and potential support that would be unique in that empire’s rela- tions with Latin Amer i ca and the Ca rib bean, the possibility may have ap- peared plausible given the escalating Cold War rivalry in that moment. What, though, would Cuba be locked into in return? At this point, Cuban agency in shaping the revolution was more limited than Castro would have ever wanted to admit.47

On March 4, a French freighter, La Coubre, bringing Belgium arms to Cuba exploded in Havana’s harbor, killing the crew members along with seventy- five Cuban dockworkers. Another roughly two hundred were in- jured. It is still unknown whether this was an accident or the result of sab- otage or bombing and, if it was the latter, whether there was a link to U.S. covert operations. But Castro immediately blamed the United States for the explosion. This seemed to many Cubans a reasonable conclusion, given the ongoing attacks on the island by Cuban exiles who were being sponsored by the U.S. government as well as the U.S. demands on allied nations not to ship arms to Cuba. In any case, the explosion made clear how vulnerable a position Cuba was in. At the funeral for the hundreds who died in this trag- edy, Castro gave what international observers felt was a deeply moving as well as combative speech: Neither “war nor famine,” he contended, could conquer Cuba. A few days after the funeral, Soviet intelligence offi- cer Alekseev reported to Moscow that Castro had made clear that he now saw socialism as the path forward. On March  15, Moscow agreed to let

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248 Chapter Six

Czecho slo va kia sell weapons to Cuba and opened the door to direct sales from the Soviet Union if required.48

Prior to La Coubre’s explosion in Havana’s harbor, Eisenhower had al- ready approved a plan for “a program of positive action to re- establish a stable, friendly, non- communist government in Cuba” through covert ac- tion. Eisenhower stressed that the plan had to remain hidden from the public: “Every one must be prepared to swear that he has not heard of it.” Nonetheless, it seems, word soon got out. At a May Day rally, Castro thun- dered against the “invasion plots” sponsored by the United States. One week later, Cuba and the Soviet Union formally resumed the diplomatic relations that Batista had broken off in the 1950s.49

From here, events unfolded in a seemingly mechanistic series of antici- pated actions and reactions. The U.S. government now turned openly to eco- nomic retaliation, though first through oil rather than sugar. Earlier that year, the trea sury secretary had envisaged a cutoff of U.S. oil exports, ar- guing that this would cripple the Cuban economy within about a month. Castro had anticipated this move and had taken action to reduce Cuban dependence on U.S. oil. As an outgrowth of the February trade deal with Cuba, the Soviet Union began exporting crude oil to the island in April. Though this protected the island somewhat, Cuba still depended on U.S. companies to refine oil, and the U.S. Trea sury and State Departments ef- fectively pressured those companies to refuse to pro cess Soviet crude oil. The Cuban government responded by taking over the U.S.- owned refineries.50

The U.S. government quickly retaliated in early July by ending all im- ports of Cuban sugar. Cuba responded by authorizing nationalizations of U.S. properties, now offering essentially no compensation, in contrast to what had been offered earlier through the agrarian reform law. The United States had thus sacrificed almost $1 billion of U.S. investments in its eco- nomic war against the Cuban government.51

At this point, the Soviet Union promised to purchase all the sugar that the island had formerly sold to the United States, though not on generous terms, and to provide military aid to the Cuban government over the next year. These were ominous developments from the point of view of U.S. stra- tegic concerns. Cuba had moved immediately after the revolution to be- come part of the nonaligned world. But now it was becoming tied directly to the Soviet empire and was importing Soviet weaponry virtually on U.S. borders.52

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Washington had pushed the Cuban government against the wall, hoping for the regime’s surrender. Instead, Cuba had secured an escape hatch, though one that was an imperial trap of its own: the Soviet Union. In a July 19 radio interview, Castro asked rhetorically about U.S. leaders: “What did they expect? . . .  For us to kneel down and wait to be killed? For us to renounce all help in this world, so we will remain alone, without a quota, and easy victims of aggression. What do they want? For us to place our necks under the Yankee axe and tell our mighty northern neighbor: ‘You can go ahead now, and let the axe fall’?”53

Of course, the alliance with the Soviet Union did not secure a proud in- de pen dence for Cuba. The island was trading one nearby empire for another more distant one. But because of its plantation economy, the Cuban govern- ment had little room to maneuver. Unless someone bought its sugar, the island would collapse eco nom ically, at least in the short- term. Did Cuba have an economic alternative? Though it would not have happened easily, the Cu- ban government might have taken a dif fer ent course, launching a transi- tion away from the island’s hyperdependence on sugar by diversifying its exports, developing new trading partners, and furthering its economic self- sufficiency. But the transitional years may have produced scarcities and sacrifices that could have been po liti cally unsustainable. The Cuban gov- ernment stuck instead with the sugar economy. This required either capit- ulation to U.S. demands or the rapid opening of a massive new market, one that the Communist world was suddenly willing to provide.

The last predictable chess moves now played out in the once unimagi- nable schism between Cuba and the United States. The dialectical unfold- ing of this conflict not only pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union but dramatically expanded state owner ship of the economy. On August 5, most of the still- vast U.S. investments on the island were seized: the great sugar mills, the large utility companies, and the oil refineries. More takeovers would follow, including that of U.S. banks. The Eisenhower administration soon decreed a ban on virtually all exports to Cuba. This was another dev- astating blow given that over three- fourths of Cuba’s imports came from the United States. Cuba then turned desperately to the Communist world. In December, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba.54

The Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China could forestall Cuban eco- nomic catastrophe, but they could not make up for the loss of U.S. trade— for the thriving, massive market and supplier next door, the minimal transportation costs and times, the appropriate spare parts, and so forth.

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During the next two years, buses, trains, and tractors all began grinding to a halt on the island. To make things worse, nearly one- fourth of the nation’s technicians and professionals had abandoned the island after the revolu- tion. It was economic folly to integrate Cuba with a Soviet market and econ- omy seven thousand miles away rather than with its giant, prosperous neighbor. Cuba had been, until then, eco nom ically “an extension of . . .  the U.S. world,” writes Carlos Franqui— a Cuban exile and former rebel leader who had been a prominent journalist in Cuba during the early 1960s. Look- ing back, however, he explained the dilemma as the Cuban leadership saw it: “To break with that world would mean going back to square one.” Yet “to accommodate ourselves to it would mean giving up any chance for reform.”55

In the fall of 1960, the Cuban government took over major domestic as well as foreign businesses. Under the terms of a second Urban Reform Law, rental properties were also expropriated. Renters were now able to acquire the properties by paying modest installments to the government over a pe- riod between five and twenty years. In essence, tenants became the owners of the properties they had rented— a great boon for lessees but a catastro- phe for the erstwhile landlords.56

Cuba’s revolutionary government had been an authoritarian regime from the start. Its leaders had openly dismissed the value of liberal democ- racy and nonetheless found overwhelming support in the early years. Since at least 1953, Castro had also openly called for a dramatic re distribution of wealth and major government- supported reforms to promote equality in education, health care, and overall material well- being for even the poor- est members of society. But as the revolution developed, it was never clear how Castro and others envisaged gathering the resources for these egali- tarian goals, whether through taxation or through profits from state enter- prise, including the appropriation of private firms. The 1959 agrarian reform expanded the state sector substantially in socialist style. But the greatest move and momentum in the direction of socialism came from Cuban ap- propriations of U.S. sugar and oil companies, which were carried out in a response to U.S. economic attacks.

More clearly still, the actions of the U.S. government pushed, and would continue to push, the Cuban regime into something it did not initially seek, something that was not part of either popu lar desires or the country’s lead- ership: a new dependence on and, as would be increasingly clear, dutiful alliance with the Soviet Union. Neither a complete break with the United States nor such a relationship with the Soviet Union was anything anyone

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concerned with Cuba would have wanted, for it brought a host of practical disadvantages. It was also a compromise of Cuban nationalism, of Castro’s announced nonaligned position after the revolution and of the increased na- tional pride the revolution had brought, as well as a radical historical re- orientation from the deep commercial, po liti cal, and cultural logic of shared U.S.- Cuban history. The accelerated events of these short years would cre- ate a strange structure of economic and po liti cal relations, linking the So- viet Union and Cuba, Eurasia and the Ca rib bean, and instituting a policy of hostility and isolation between the United States and Cuba that would last for six de cades, perhaps more. The event that fully cemented this painful reconfiguration was, ironically, an attempt by the United States to over- throw the Cuban government.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion

When John Kennedy was inaugurated as the new U.S. president in Janu- ary  1961, Fidel Castro expressed readiness “to begin anew.” In early March 1961, he raised the possibility of negotiations over compensation for nationalized properties formerly owned by U.S. investors that might lead to a deal for renewed U.S. sugar purchases. Instead, though, Kennedy pro- ceeded with his pre de ces sor Dwight Eisenhower’s plans, which had been initiated in the fall of 1959, for a covert military operation to topple Cuba’s revolutionary government.57

Kennedy did so despite his administration’s serious doubts about the CIA’s plan. The plan entailed some one thousand exiles- turned- soldiers invading the island under the direction of the agency. Yet how could they defeat the new Cuban armed forces, which totaled thirty- two thousand troops, and a popu lar militia with at least two hundred thousand? When the CIA briefed the incoming secretary of state, they offered two dif fer ent prospects for success. In plan A, the landing of Cuban exiles would “cause the revolt of large segments of the Cuban Army and Militia” and “precipitate a general uprising.” There was, however, no empirical or analytical reason to sus- pect this might happen given the absence of any evidence of widespread opposition among Cubans at large or the military leadership. The CIA also presented a somewhat more realistic plan B: “The lodgement established by our force can be used as the site for establishment of a provisional gov- ernment which can be recognized by the US, and hopefully by other Amer- ican states, and given overt military assistance. The way will then be paved for United States military intervention.”58

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The new administration was not reassured. The assistant secretary of state for inter- American affairs, Thomas Mann, immediately dismissed the likelihood of an uprising against the government, central to plan A, and Kennedy himself rejected the idea of “U.S. military intervention,” key to plan B. These objections, though, did not dissuade the CIA from pushing ahead. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would later attempt to explain its seemingly irrational be hav ior. The CIA “did not believe” that the president would not send in U.S. troops even though he stated this both privately and publicly. Richard Bissell, who had been in charge of the operation, himself later af- firmed that he had “felt that when the chips were down— when the crisis arose in real ity, any action required for success would be authorized, rather than permit the enterprise to fail.” Schlesinger had also earlier warned the president that the “real belief” of Miami’s exiles was certainly “that the logic of the situation will require the US to send in Marines to make the invasion a success.”59 Why Kennedy agreed, then, to move ahead with the plan is dif- ficult to discern. Perhaps the president was simply overtaken by events and by the confidence of the CIA leadership that, despite what it seemed, this plan was going to work even without U.S. military intervention.

On April 15, 1961, U.S. fighter planes painted with Cuban markers took off from Nicaragua— then under the Somoza dictatorship, a U.S. ally— and began bombing Cuban military bases to try to destroy as much as pos si ble of the country’s military aircraft and runways. Two days later, some 1,400 Cuban exiles descended on the island at the Bay of Pigs, most by ships es- corted by the U.S. Navy. The majority hailed from Cuba’s professional middle and upper classes and some were members of Batista’s regime, including a few of its old henchmen. The following day, the CIA reported, “six friendly B-26s, two of them flown by Americans, inflicted heavy damage on the Castro column” heading toward the bay, “using napalm, bombs, rockets, and machine gun fire to destroy several tanks and 20 troop- laden trucks.” Despite suffering significant casualties, the Cuban militia and regular army continued marching forward. They appeared willing to fight what must have seemed against all odds— against what they likely assumed was the beginning of a full- fledged U.S. invasion.60

U.S. troops, though, never came. Less surprisingly, there was no upris- ing in support of the invaders and against the government. Instead, the in- vasion inspired an outpouring of nationalism and widespread mobilization among the population at large to defend the homeland. However, it also pro- voked a massive wave of repression against those the government per- ceived as potential opponents, including critics on the left. Security forces

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rounded up tens of thousands suspected of discontent in makeshift deten- tion centers, a portion of whom would remain imprisoned even long after the operation was over. Cuban victory came swiftly on the battlefield. Al- ready by April 18, the day after the exile troops landed, thousands of Cu- ban troops surrounded the CIA- trained exiles, and the exiles soon surrendered. They had hoped for further U.S. air strikes on the Cuban mil- itary. Had this happened, it might have allowed them to hold their ground in the thick Zapata Swamp a bit longer, but they still would have had no prayer, on their own, against the army and popu lar militia.61

When the exile brigade was surrounded by Cuban troops, Kennedy’s na- tional security adviser raised the issue that had shadowed the operation from the beginning: “The real question is whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention.” But Kennedy, to the surprise of the CIA leadership, stuck to his earlier position and refused to go in with U.S. troops, even once it was clear that the expedition was headed for a humiliating defeat. The president proved willing to suffer a symbolic and real loss in Cuba, even in this tense moment of rivalry in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Kennedy recognized that a successful U.S. invasion would likely require, in his words, “a fucking slaughter” if it lacked popu lar backing. Kennedy also had to consider the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in a broader context. The day after the exile troops landed on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev tele grammed Kennedy and in- dicated that any expanded intervention in Cuba by the United States could provoke Soviet action elsewhere in places where things had been, for the moment at least, “settled” between the superpowers. By proposing pos si- ble Soviet action in response to any U.S. intervention in Cuba, Khrushchev was most likely implying a military move on West Berlin, which was per- haps the most pivotal Cold War concern that Kennedy faced when he was inaugurated in January. For Moscow, a U.S. invasion of Cuba could serve perversely to legitimate Soviet demands for control over West Berlin— occupied by the United States, France, and England after World War II— and distract from pos si ble aggressive moves on the city vulnerably situated in the heart of Communist East Germany. Kennedy tried to assure Khrush- chev that “the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba.”62

The CIA’s loss was Castro’s gain. David had, once again, defeated Goli- ath. In this moment of strength, the Cuban government reached out to the United States. Guevara, now serving as minister of economics and the most prominent revolutionary figure after Castro, contacted a White House aide

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at an inter- American conference in Uruguay, Richard Goodwin. “Guevara began by saying,” Goodwin reported, that the Cuban government intended “to build a Socialist state, and the revolution which they have begun is ir- reversible.” But, Guevara went on, “they would like a modus vivendi” with the United States. Toward this end, Guevara’s government would be will- ing to pay for nationalized properties “in trade” (sugar sales presumably); refrain from “any po liti cal alliances with the East,” that is, the Communist bloc and confer with the U.S. government about “the activities of the Cu- ban revolution in other countries.” Perhaps Guevara hoped that U.S. lead- ers now recognized how difficult it would be to overthrow the Cuban government and would therefore consider a compromise that was prefera- ble for both sides to the status quo. (The status quo would lead, for instance, to the Cuban missile crisis the following year.) The Kennedy administration, though, was unwilling, or unable po liti cally, to accept this compromise that would have respected Cuba’s domestic autonomy in return for constraints on the island’s foreign policy.63

With every reason now to expect a U.S. invasion might follow the failed Bay of Pigs attack, the Cuban government also sought to maximize Cuba’s military wherewithal and security. To that end, it requested large amounts of Soviet military assistance, which until then had remained relatively modest. And the Cuban government’s growing ties to the Soviet Union were accom- panied by further movement toward a fully state- run socialist economy and, soon, a ubiquitous official Communist ideology. By 1961, one- third of agricul- ture, half of retail commerce, and higher levels of the other sectors of the economy were already in state hands. From there the government moved rapidly toward an even greater takeover of the economy. In 1963, the limit on landholding was cut drastically from 1,000 to 166 acres, with the state pro- viding compensation to owners of expropriated land over a ten- year period. Private land was thus reduced from about two- thirds to roughly one- third of all agricultural property. There was also a second wave of socialization of property in 1968. Most of the remaining nonagricultural parts of the econ- omy were taken over by the state, particularly retail trade, at this time as well. This stimulated another exodus of Cubans, bringing the total number of emigrants following the revolution to almost a million by 1970.64

State owner ship of the means of production, including two- thirds of the country’s land, foreclosed some revolutionary possibilities surrounding ag- riculture in Cuba. In the Sierra Maestra, a great number of people did gain land and realized many of their hopes. And in the country as a whole, the Cuban government kept its promise to make property holders out of the

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large population of sharecroppers, tenants, and squatters. But the planta- tion economy driven by cane cutters, the country’s core, remained intact. The country was also as dependent on a single foreign purchaser and a sin- gle export as ever— and thus as vulnerable to Soviet dictates as it had pre- viously been to the U.S. government.65

Might it have been pos si ble to create a dif fer ent agricultural model—to break up the sugar plantations, diversify agriculture, and provide vast op- portunities for small farmers; to forge a new rural order with greater indi- vidual and national autonomy? Might that even have allowed the island to avoid having to accept either U.S. or Soviet dependence and hegemony? The space of possibility opened up by the revolution for a counter- plantation re- structuring was shut down so rapidly by Castro in the 1959 agrarian re- form, and then by the turn to Soviet trade and growing aid on the basis of sugar exports, that these questions remain unanswered.

The sugar industry did modernize in ways that would be beneficial for workers as well as the country. By the 1980s, the vast majority of the indus- try was mechanized, and labor became less physically arduous. The terms of employment improved. And the number of workers declined—at one point to less than a third of pre-1959 levels—with no reduction in output, an impressive feat even with Soviet aid. Many then found preferable em- ployment outside of the sugar fields and agriculture altogether. And cane cutters, like others, had access to newly established rights, most dramati- cally universal health care, which over time would reach the level of high- income nations such as the United States. In terms of the workforce, labor conditions, and the socioeconomic quality of life, Cuba was no longer the same kind of plantation society it had been for the past nearly two hun- dred years.66

Po liti cally, however, there was no silver lining for the population at large. After the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the Cuban Revolution consolidated a regime of widespread surveillance, rigid control, and po liti cal conformity. And socialism made the dictatorship all the more power ful, for now the gov- ernment controlled the means of employment as well as repression. Fur- thermore, with the turn toward Communism, official ideology became increasingly doctrinaire and repetitive, constraining the life of the mind and surely a people’s spirit.

Even when the leadership of the Cuban Revolution enjoyed much sup- port among the majority of the population early on, its leaders insisted on an environment of strict and far- reaching po liti cal intolerance and repres- sion, denying people free speech, assembly, and other civil and po liti cal

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rights. The writer Virgilio Piñera pressed Castro in late 1961 to think about the oppressive and constraining aspects of the revolution from the per- spective of intellectuals: “Have you ever asked yourself why any writer should [have to] be afraid of the Revolution?” he asked, and “Why [is] the Revolution . . .  so afraid of writers?” The revolutionary government was repressive, too, in social domains. The government viciously repressed, for instance, those perceived as homosexual or gender nonconforming, most infamously in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In these years, many people thought to be gay were sent to forced labor camps, excluded from the uni- versity, and fired from their jobs. Harsh government repression was also reflected in the extraordinarily high number of po liti cal prisoners, espe- cially during the 1960s and in the 1970s as well.67

The way the Cuban Revolution had played out, and particularly the fact that it had led to a radical break with the United States, conditioned po liti- cal visions and possibilities throughout the region. In the Dominican Re- public, another Ca rib bean leader, Juan Bosch, who had witnessed the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution, sought to find a dif fer ent path. Com- mitted to the consolidation of a non- plantation order and social democ- racy, he hoped that he could work with the United States to pursue these goals. He was to discover, however, that land reform and any refusal to ca- ter to U.S. strategic concerns would still be seen as intolerable, by both U.S. and local elite interests, even when they were carried out through a liberal demo cratic pro cess and without any links to the Communist world. The re- sults, in fact, of the Bosch- era social- democratic and nationalist- populist blip in the Dominican Republic would be bloody and stormy, ushering in a military coup, a revolutionary uprising against it, and a U.S. military inva- sion to help put down that uprising.

“Revolutionary Democracy” in the Dominican Republic

In December of 1962, fair elections were held in the Dominican Republic for the first time in almost four de cades and only the second time in the country’s history. The overthrow the year before of the dictator Rafael Tru- jillo Molina, who had ruled with an iron fist for over three de cades, un- leashed power ful forces of change. While some Dominicans focused only on democ ratization, others dreamed of carry ing out dramatic socioeco- nomic reforms. Among the latter was Juan Bosch Gaviño, a longtime anti- Trujillo exile from a fairly modest rural background, who ran in 1962 for the country’s highest office as the candidate of the Dominican Revolutionary

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Party. Bosch had helped found this party in 1939  in Cuba while in exile from Trujillo’s regime. He campaigned on a populist platform, promising agrarian and other reforms and to govern for the people rather than the power ful. In addition to land re distribution, Bosch called for expanding public education and health care and a rise in the minimum wage. He won a landslide election, receiving 59  percent of the vote.68

This was a moment of great hope in the Dominican Republic. With a popu lar mandate for change, Bosch was ready to take the country peace- fully away from a despotic past and toward greater equity as well as free- dom. His philosophy was that of a “revolutionary democracy,” he proclaimed in Washington shortly after his election: “revolutionary” because he sought rapid socioeconomic reforms, “democracy” because he sought to achieve them in the context of self- government and guaranteed civil liberties. Bosch promised meaningful social change within a liberal demo cratic order—in contrast to neighboring Cuba— and with it, he hoped, continued good rela- tions with the United States. To that end, Bosch frequently expressed staunch opposition to Communism. In a speech given several weeks after his inau- guration, he proclaimed: “ There is only one dilemma and it is quite clear: either democracy or communism. And communism means death, war, de- struction, and the loss of all our possessions.”69

Yet despite every effort to steer a course for social change that could not be compared to Castro or Communism, Bosch quickly provoked the anger of U.S. government leaders, as well as the wealthy and power ful in Santo Domingo, and would be overthrown by a military coup less than one year later. That, in turn, would eventually provoke an urban uprising demand- ing the restoration of Bosch’s government. And, in response, the U.S. mili- tary invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic to help the Dominican military put down the uprising. For the next thirteen years, the Dominican state would remain under authoritarian rule, characterized by corrupt elec- tions and brutal repression overseen by a president whom U.S. leaders helped put in office, Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo’s former right- hand man. The history of the short- lived Bosch government and its unsuccessful strug gle to realize popu lar reforms dramatizes the tremendous challenges facing any attempt at socioeconomic change in the twentieth- century Ca rib bean. U.S. opposition to change in Ca rib bean nations was couched in the rhe toric of anti- Communism, but it reflected a pattern dating back to long before the Cold War: U.S. intervention to ensure in the strategically impor tant neigh- boring Ca rib bean region allies who both dutifully and effectively supported U.S. international positions and economic interests.

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As was the case in Cuba, the center of Bosch’s promised transformation was a major new agrarian reform. Over the violent objections of its oppo- nents, in 1963 his government passed a new constitution that prohibited latifundia, stipulating that limits on the size of landholdings were to be determined by future legislation. Bosch also spoke of the possibility of put- ting state sugar mills “in the hands of the workers and administered through cooperatives.” Bosch promised, too, new public hospitals, schools, housing, and public works jobs to reduce unemployment and build new infrastructure. For such proj ects to succeed in this low- income nation, the Bosch administration would have to find funds to support them and prop- erty for land re distribution, all the while not mobilizing elite re sis tance and losing U.S. support. This was challenging given that Bosch sought mea sures that inevitably would come at some expense to power ful domes- tic groups as well as U.S. interests.70

Bosch had reason to hope, though, stemming from po liti cal developments in the United States. President John Kennedy, prior to his election, had ex- pressed support for governments such as Bosch’s. In March 1962, Kennedy delivered a speech in which he declared that “ those who possess wealth and power in poor nations must accept their own responsibilities” to help the country. “ Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,” he warned, “ will make violent revolution inevitable.” Clearly the Cuban Revolution had awoken U.S. leaders to the dangers of in equality and dictatorship produc- ing radical ferment.71

Bosch sought to take advantage of the rhe toric surrounding what became known as Kennedy’s Alliance for Pro gress. He praised the United States for no longer considering any government that did not conform to the policy preferences of the U.S. government “communist, or pro- communist.” Bosch was, in a way, trying to remind U.S. officials of their own new stance as a way of protecting himself, by petitioning them proactively not to cast his presidency as Communist and unacceptable if and when it took mea sures that were not perceived as ideal for U.S. interests. He clearly understood that he had to negotiate carefully with the United States during his hoped- for “revolutionary democracy.” Soon after his election, Bosch de cided to re- scind a contract signed between the previous government and U.S.- owned Standard Oil, whose terms he considered unfair. He discussed this directly in a meeting with Kennedy, and at the same time offered to cooperate with the United States, in alliance with other demo cratic Latin American coun- tries, to support opposition within Cuba. Bosch was convincing: Kennedy concluded the meeting stating that the demo cratic experiment in the

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Dominican Republic, if successful, would represent a blow to Communism. Similarly, New York Times reporter Tad Szulc would write that Bosch’s “success could dramatize for Latin Amer i ca the possibility of . . .  a sys- tem of freedom and material improvement . . .  [while] failure would strengthen the claim of Fidel Castro that violent revolution and Commu- nism indeed offer Latin Amer i ca’s only road to economic development and human justice.”72

Yet Bosch faced intense opposition from better- off Dominicans, who con- demned the new constitution and lashed out at Bosch for supposedly giv- ing in to workers’ demands and discouraging foreign investment. U.S. investment interests in the Dominican Republic also began to attack him as a Communist. At first, the threat posed to Bosch by his power ful oppo- nents remained relatively small, because U.S. officials manifested support for the government and commitment to democracy in the Dominican Re- public. Understanding that U.S. approval was vital, Bosch continually shared his policy plans, particularly those about agrarian reform, with the U.S. am- bassador John Bartlow Martin. Bosch had seen how the 1952 and 1959 land reforms in Guatemala and Cuba had rapidly led to U.S. covert operations that aimed to topple their governments. He might have found some com- fort in the fact that those reforms profoundly affected U.S. direct invest- ments in ways that changes in the Dominican Republic would not. In the 1950s, Trujillo had harassed most U.S. sugar companies into selling their properties to the government, and to Trujillo himself. As a result, U.S. in- vestments in the country were now only a modest $105 million. Still, Bosch worked to sell the agrarian reform to the United States in Kennedy- like fashion. On May 27, he told the Miami Herald that the best way to ensure that Communism did not win over hearts and minds in Latin Amer i ca was with policies proving that demo cratic systems could effectively address the social and economic hardships of the region.73

Although they refrained from labeling his regime as Communist, U.S. of- ficials still protested the efforts by Bosch that they saw as being disadvan- tageous for U.S. business interests. U.S. officials were also unhappy with Bosch’s attempts to obtain private land to distribute to small farmers through a policy that levied a 20  percent tax on acreage in excess of certain limits, to be paid in land. “The U.S. press, already deeply suspicious, would scream that it was Cuba all over again,” the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Latin Amer i ca predicted, and Bosch would then “be denied all U.S. aid.” Bosch was, in fact, receiving barely any aid at the time, but the threat of losing U.S. support was nonetheless dangerous symbolically, for it might make him

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260 Chapter Six

more vulnerable to his opponents at home. “ There’s going to be trou ble on that little island for a long time” if Bosch went ahead with a tax on land, Secretary of State Dean Rusk remarked ominously in late June.74

Bosch, though, was committed to agrarian reform, and he envisioned not only this tax but also other mea sures designed to facilitate state confisca- tion of land for distribution. He planned to send to Congress a law that would require owners to give a portion of their land to the government in return for new public improvements, particularly for irrigation. He also sought leg- islation defining precisely what constituted excessive land owner ship (lati- fundia), as called for in the constitution, to help obtain land that could be redistributed to those in need. Fi nally, from the start of his administration, Bosch set out to redistribute the im mense landholdings that had been in the hands of the Trujillos and their close associates. Some five hundred thou- sand acres had reportedly been confiscated by the state after the dictator’s assassination. But here Bosch faced legal, fiscal, and practical obstacles on the domestic front. The majority of the Trujillo family’s properties were sugar plantations or timberland, neither of which was seen as readily suit- able and comparatively profitable for small- scale farming. Breaking up the sugar estates might therefore reduce the nation’s collective wealth, at least at first. And the state sugar industry was critical for government revenue. There were strong pressures, therefore, to leave these estates intact. Bosch gave in to these forces, following a long tradition of even the most pro- found of the Ca rib be an’s revolutionaries— Toussaint Louverture and Fidel Castro— who refused to break up large plantations in order to constitute an alternative economic program built around a dif fer ent model of produc- tion and dif fer ent kinds of products.75

Still, the government had hoped to grant to small farmers almost half of the confiscated properties, which was close to 250,000 acres, a vast amount of land in the Dominican Republic. Yet many of these areas, too, faced ob- stacles to re distribution. Under the prior transition government, numerous individuals, claiming that the Trujillo state had wrongfully seized their properties, took possession of them again. Many of these individuals were now challenging the Bosch government’s right to the confiscated land. The previous administration had also quickly sold or leased a part of them.

Concretely, this all meant that a great deal of land that might have been controlled by the state and redistributed to small farmers was going instead to better- off and wealthy citizens. Bosch argued publicly that many of the claims being made to return confiscated lands were based on fraud and clever manipulation of the courts, as a result of which “the Dominican

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people are in danger of seeing all the confiscated properties” lost and even returned to indirect representatives of the Trujillo family and others, many of whom were “ people accused of having made fortunes, under the protec- tion of the tyranny, with the bones and the blood of the Dominican people.” A new law, Bosch declared, was needed that would allow Congress to intervene in property disputes over confiscated lands in order to keep injustices from occurring and to let the agrarian reform move forward. Unsurprisingly, Bosch’s introduction of this law to the legislature earned him many power ful enemies. U.S. ambassador Martin explained afterward: “It hit a nerve— the money nerve,” and in the pro cess “galvanized the bitter enmity of the propertied classes.” The nation’s business associations joined together to condemn Bosch’s proposed law as unconstitutional. Bosch fought back, promoting his approach as the only way to preempt a revolution. His law was needed to “forestall the popu lar explosion that may be [other wise] provoked here,” he claimed.76

Amid these growing tensions with the nation’s power ful, Bosch also be- gan losing support from his needed ally, the United States. Although U.S. officials’ formal relations with and public statements about the still clearly demo cratic Bosch remained nominally supportive, informally some began to make clear they were, in fact, intensely opposed to his administration. Military advisers, those working at the Agency for International Develop- ment, and others were “talking at cocktail parties” now “about the danger of communism in the Republic.”77

The weakness of the U.S. commitment to Bosch was only partly attrib- utable to concerns about investment. Bosch sustained an in de pen dent stance regarding foreign as well as domestic policy, something virtually unpre ce- dented in Dominican history and in the in de pen dent Ca rib bean at large until the Cuban Revolution. Significantly, Bosch rejected U.S. calls to pub- licly denounce Cuba. U.S. officials were similarly unhappy with Bosch for refusing to ban the country’s two small Communist parties and take action against its members. Only a tiny number of Dominicans were members of either one of the two, each of which had membership only in the hundreds (negligible numbers in a nation of three million). Despite the insignificance of Communism in the Dominican Republic, Kennedy wrote to Ambassador Martin about Bosch: “I’m wondering if the day might not come when he’d like to get rid of some of the left. Tell him we re spect his judgement . . .  but the time may come when he’ll want to deport thirty or fifty people. . . .  I suppose he’d have to catch them in something.” Bosch protested in a public speech that to arrest and deport people because of their po liti cal ideas would

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make us “begin to resemble the thing we hate.” U.S. leaders also fretted over Bosch’s refusal to ban travel to Cuba. Bosch responded to their pressures by proudly insisting that his administration would “kneel neither to Mos- cow, nor to Washington.” “I wrap myself in the Dominican flag, and I will not wrap any other around me, alive or dead.”78

The growing U.S. antagonism toward Bosch emboldened the opposition within the Dominican Republic, and some in the military began to plan a coup. Bosch made a reluctant last effort to save the dream of the “revolu- tionary democracy” when he requested that a U.S. aircraft carrier be sent to Santo Domingo to signal to his opponents that he still had U.S. support. On September 24, 1963, the Kennedy administration refused Bosch’s re- quest. It also took no steps through diplomatic intervention or pressure to stop the plotting of a coup. Given the intimacy of U.S. officials with the coun- try’s military and key players, and the leverage the U.S. government had over them, such dissuasion would not have been difficult. But the State De- partment explained to Ambassador Martin that the U.S. government had de cided it would not “save Bosch in view of his past per for mance,” includ- ing his refusal to follow the ambassador’s directions on how “to govern ef- fectively.” The U.S. government would certainly not “intervene militarily unless a Communist takeover were threatened.” It would not, that is, act against a pro- U.S. military takeover, even one overthrowing a demo- cratically elected government that had staunchly defended civil liberties.79

In the absence of contrary U.S. pressure, conservative forces in the Do- minican Republic made their move against Bosch’s “demo cratic revolution” seven months after it began, with no explanation or justification other than policy differences. On September 25, 1963, one day after Kennedy ignored Bosch’s plea for a show of support, the military staged a coup, took Bosch prisoner, and forced him into exile in Puerto Rico. Forty- five minutes after Bosch’s arrest, Ambassador Martin sent a recommendation to Washington that advocated rejecting Bosch’s vice president as a pos si ble successor to the president. This makes clear how readily the U.S. ambassador accepted the coup as a fait accompli and presumed the U.S. government would have le- verage, if needed, in choosing the makeup of the new regime. But while Martin would have preferred a pseudo- constitutional resolution, with the president of the Senate appointed as president, the military chose a civil- ian triumvirate led by Donald Reid Cabral, a wealthy entrepreneur from one of the country’s leading families and a member of the conservative Civic Union Party. Reid Cabral had been a vice president in the pre- Bosch regime and an opponent of Bosch’s administration. He was also a U.S. favorite.80

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“I take it we don’t want Bosch back,” Kennedy said to Martin a few days after the coup, seeming to presume it was, to some extent, up to him. “No, Mr.  President,” the ambassador replied. U.S. leaders could not count on Bosch to be a pliable ally, certainly, in the pre sent or for what ever future contingency might arise. Still, the United States did not immediately rec- ognize the new government imposed by the military. “The easiest course to follow here is recognition after considerable delay and hard bargaining,” Martin explained to the secretary of state two days after the coup. The de- lay provided the U.S. government with leverage and would also insulate it from domestic and international criticism. After all, a demo cratically elected government— its president, legislature, and constitution— had been over- thrown by a coup without any legal pretext or procedure, and Kennedy had continued until the end to support Bosch’s government publicly. Still, recognition came soon enough. In December, the new U.S. president follow- ing Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson, quickly resumed normal diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic and began sending eco- nomic aid and military assistance.81

The 1963 Constitution that had been Bosch’s signal accomplishment was immediately abrogated and replaced by the previous one. Some one thou- sand perceived opponents were arrested in the first two days after the coup, although about half were released after a brief detention. Following State Department wishes, Communist organ izations were banned and po liti cal undesirables prohibited from entering the country, including any Domini- can citizen who had traveled to a Communist nation. The new state lead- ers, Martin reported with satisfaction two days after the coup, were pro- U.S. and would turn to him “personally.”82

The new Reid Cabral regime was neither popu lar nor stable. It had over- turned a social demo cratic leader who had gained office with the backing of two- thirds of the electorate. The new government, following dictates by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), cut back spending on public works and social ser vices. Unemployment rose, and there was little assistance available to the population. Opposition developed quickly, and the state ar- rested, wounded, and killed hundreds in response to increasing numbers of protests and strikes.83

By early 1965, a CIA poll indicated only 5  percent of Dominicans sup- ported the government. Despite the virtual una nim i ty with which the high- ranking military officers had supported the coup against Bosch, this lack of any social base for the new regime may help explain why numerous officers began now to conspire against it, building secret alliances with

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Bosch to overthrow the Triumvirate. From Puerto Rico, Bosch or ga nized a movement involving soldiers at the lower ranks. Those who opposed Reid Cabral called themselves “Constitutionalists,” rallying around their desires to restore demo cratic rule and Bosch’s 1963 Constitution.84

On April 24, 1965, a segment of the military rebelled, with much backing — or at least acceptance— among high- ranking officers. Massive crowds took to the streets in Santo Domingo and other cities cheering “We want Juan Bosch!” and expressing their support “for the honest military fighting for the Constitution.” The demonstrators were unarmed and peaceful, and there was no immediate re sis tance to them by the armed forces. Recogniz- ing that he had as little backing among civilians as he had within the mili- tary that had originally helped put him in power, Reid Cabral quickly resigned and left the government in the hands of a military junta. Hopeful that they would soon be returned to office, the Constitutionalists appointed a provisional president, José Rafael Molina Ureña, on April 25. Molina Ureña had been president of the Dominican legislature’s Chamber of Deputies dur- ing Bosch’s aborted presidency. This placed him next in the line of consti- tutional succession after the vice president and president of the Senate, who were also in exile. He agreed to govern “ until Professor Juan Bosch, the constitutional president, returns to his native soil.”85

Demo cratic Revolution and U.S. Intervention

This Constitutionalist movement had not begun in revolutionary fashion. The goal was to return the office of the presidency to the person who had been elected, Juan Bosch, and to oust the dictatorial government that a mil- itary coup d’état had ushered in nineteen months back. Bosch was a proven demo crat and reformist, and a leader who had continually reached out to the U.S. ambassador during his brief presidency. The moderate character of his government helps explain the substantial military support for the counter- coup to restore him to office. Eight of the original twenty- five offi- cers who had officially backed the removal of Bosch in the 1963 coup now advocated Bosch’s return, with only six still supporting the Reid Cabral gov- ernment.86

U.S. officials, including the relatively new president Lyndon Johnson, re- sponded to events unfolding in the Dominican Republic with concern. “Failure to resolve the dissension among the military,” the State Department reported to Johnson, “would cause a dangerous situation.” Their immediate

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focus was on resolving the crisis in a way that left the existing army intact. As we have seen, the creation of a power ful new military linked to the United States had been one of the main objectives and certainly a lasting legacy of the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic between 1916 and 1924, as it had also been of the occupations of Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua in the early twentieth century. An armed rebellion with popu lar support and the government’s display of far greater in de pen dence from U.S. wishes than before, whether in domestic reforms or foreign affairs, could open the door to the military’s replacement. The creation of a new army in Cuba after its 1959 revolution had changed every thing.87

The initial reaction of the Dominican military leadership to the counter- coup was not to defend Reid Cabral’s government, but rather to try to find a modus vivendi with his opponents. The military leaders immediately en- tered into negotiations with the rebelling Constitutionalist military officers and proposed that a military junta replace the Triumvirate. This, however, was not acceptable to the leaders of the counter- coup, who insisted on Bosch’s return to the presidency. In the midst of potentially successful ne- gotiations over this dispute, U.S. officials exhorted the military leaders who had not openly supported the coup to act decisively now to stop a pos si ble “communist takeover,” even if this ended up involving much “bloodshed.” Swayed by U.S. pressure, those who would now call themselves the Loyal- ists withdrew from negotiations. The air force then bombed the Presiden- tial Palace where those negotiations had been taking place, as well as areas of the city supporting the Constitutionalists. Rapidly, the situation escalated into civil war between the Loyalist army establishment and the Constitu- tionalist soldiers, who soon began arming civilian supporters. The reaction of the U.S. government thus helped turn a relatively conservative civil- military coup that looked like it had a chance of restoring a demo cratically elected government into a mass uprising and the beginning of long, bloody battles that would leave an estimated six thousand Dominicans killed or wounded.88

Johnson made clear to one of his key advisers, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter- American Affairs Thomas Mann, that he wanted to take con- trol of the ongoing pro cess of change. “ We’re going to have to really set up that government down there and run it and stabilize it some way or other,” Johnson told Mann in a recorded phone call. “This Bosch is no good.” Mann agreed: “He was, he is no good at all. . . .  The man to get back, I think, is Balaguer,” meaning Joaquín Balaguer, the former puppet president under

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Trujillo and current leader of the Reformist Party. Johnson then instructed Mann: “That’s what you’re gonna do, so that’s your prob lem. . . .  You’d better figure it out. . . .  Do it some way or other.” Johnson essentially or- dered Mann “some way or other” to take control over who the next presi- dent of the Dominican Republic would be. The in de pen dent Ca rib bean was clearly the U.S. Ca rib bean in Johnson’s eyes.89

“We will not consent to Bosch’s return,” U.S. Embassy officials told the leaders of Bosch’s party the following day. The issue for U.S. leaders seemed to be the restoration of Bosch’s presidency in and of itself, whether or not there was a perceived Communist threat. U.S. officials had found Bosch too resistant to U.S. demands for their liking in the past, and now, in the wake of a mass uprising, Bosch’s administration would have more po liti cal capi- tal to carry out his program and sustain his po liti cal princi ples. Further- more, if Bosch were restored on the backs of a popu lar revolution, a number of military leaders who had opposed it would no doubt be removed, reducing the possibilities for a new reactionary coup against Bosch if he acted too in de pen dently from elite Dominican and U.S. wishes. As Piero Gleijeses writes, “ there would have been more urgency for, and less re sis- tance to, social reforms”— reforms U.S. leaders had opposed in 1963— and the dream of “revolutionary democracy” that had fueled Bosch’s landslide election might be realized.90

What the Constitutionalist leaders had initially hoped would be a blood- less coup had turned into a civil war. The Loyalists supporting the military junta had the military momentum at first and the potentially overwhelm- ing armed forces of the United States on their side. Some Constitutionalist leaders abandoned the strug gle and secured asylum in foreign embassies. But the chief military leaders and the supporters of the Constitutionalist cause continued to fight with the support of thousands of soldiers and ci- vilians. Urban residents in Santo Domingo, particularly in working- class and poor neighborhoods, joined the armed strug gle in large numbers. Some helped set up barricades, while others provided food and tended to the wounded. They resisted Loyalist attempts to take control of the capital, at a cost of a great many lives. The Constitutionalists, gaining more and more ground, planned an assault on the country’s army headquarters, San Isidro. The uprising represented something unpre ce dented in Dominican history. Whereas traditionally insurrections had started in rural areas and sometimes invaded the capital, this time the urban working class had risen up, fighting for a state that represented them and was responsive to their needs.91

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“To Prevent Another Cuba”

Both the United States and the Dominican military junta now insisted that U.S. intervention was needed. The military asked for “unlimited and im- mediate military assistance” from the United States. As it became clear that the military junta was losing control, the U.S. ambassador panicked and advised Washington: “[T]ime has come to land the Marines.” His justifica- tion: “All indications point to the fact that if pre sent efforts of forces . . .  [of] the government fail, power will be assumed by groups clearly identi- fied with the Communist Party. . . .  [We] should intervene to prevent an- other Cuba from arising out of the ashes of this uncontrollable situation.”92

The claim made by the U.S. ambassador and the junta of the leading role of the Communist party in the uprising was a profound distortion of real- ity. Communist and far- left parties were only marginal players both in the Constitutionalist movement and in the country overall. The two minuscule Dominican Communist parties had a combined membership of only eight hundred to a thousand people. Somewhat larger and more relevant, but still small and weak, was the 14th  of June Movement. Originally an anti- Trujillista party, the movement had moved increasingly to the left after 1962, and some members, though not others, supported state- socialist eco- nomic approaches. After Bosch’s overthrow in 1963, the movement, unlike the larger po liti cal parties, had supported armed strug gle against the mili- tary regime, and a small number of its members had traveled to Cuba to receive guerrilla training. None of these parties, though, played a role in planning or leading the counter- coup. In fact, it took them by surprise. They did not even back it at first, though they did join in after the counter- coup gave rise to a popu lar uprising supporting Bosch’s return to the presidency.93

The claim that the Constitutionalists posed a Communist threat none- theless served as a power ful rationalization for U.S. intervention, one that resonated in Washington. We do not know the precise brew of ignorance and cynicism in the baseless assertions of a Communist threat. U.S. officials were not wrong, though, that the revolution involved a mea sure of uncer- tainty. By sending U.S. troops into Santo Domingo, U.S. leaders would put themselves in a position to control the pro cess of change and to ensure that it moved in a direction serving what they saw as U.S. interests.

Johnson revealed another part of his own motivation when he expressed concerns that a victory by the side that the U.S. government opposed in the Dominican Republic could represent a second major embarrassment for U.S. power in just a few years— another Bay of Pigs. As he told Mann, he simply

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didn’t “want the rebels to win; he had just about lived down the Bay of Pigs,” and he did not want to end up “in another spot like that.” Johnson was de- termined to demonstrate U.S. strength and resolve, especially in the in de- pen dent Ca rib bean, which U.S. presidents had long considered to be their turf. A swift military victory in the Dominican Republic looked feasible, and it would serve as a reassertion of U.S. overseas power. Johnson also consid- ered his action in the Dominican crisis as part of a global Cold War chess- board. The administration began major deployments of U.S. forces to Vietnam in April 1965, the same month as the U.S. invasion of the Domini- can Republic. Johnson’s advisers recalled him voicing concern that no one “could believe his determination in Indochina if he appeared weak in the Ca rib be an.”94 The logic, though, of invading the Dominican Republic in part to make a statement to the Viet nam ese would prove as in effec tive in Asia as it was imperialist in the Ca rib bean.

Just four days after the launch of the counter- coup to reinstate Bosch, forty years after the Marines had withdrawn from their first Dominican occupation, the U.S. military invaded the Dominican Republic a second time. U.S. deployments rapidly escalated until they reached twenty- three thousand troops, a large number for a country with just over three million inhabitants. From Johnson’s point of view, overwhelming military force ensured that the Dominican crisis would not lead to anything seen as a hu- miliating defeat for the United States like the Bay of Pigs, but rather would demonstrate continuing U.S. power in the region and beyond. From Domin- icans’ point of view, this was something very dif fer ent: a second U.S. tram- pling on their nation’s sovereignty and imposition of U.S. po liti cal wishes on their country, just four de cades after Dominicans had last fought for in- de pen dence from U.S. rule.95

Immediately after the invasion was launched, the CIA began searching for evidence of a Communist threat within the Constitutionalist movement. CIA director Admiral William Raborn asserted that three Constitutionalist leaders were Communists, that eight “hard- core, Castro- trained guerrillas” had “knocked the Bosch people out” of the picture and seized “command of the city,” and that the uprising in support of Bosch was, in fact, a “strug- gle mounted by Mr. Castro.” The numbers of “Castro- trained guerrillas” that U.S. leaders claimed were part of the uprising quickly ballooned. The next day, Johnson spoke to his aides of a list of forty- five “Castro- trained, Castro- operated” Dominican rebels.96

The list of these forty- five supposed “Castro- trained, Castro- operated” rebels was quickly discredited by journalists, and the CIA’s claims were

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rejected even by several key Johnson aides. National Security Adviser Mc- George Bundy sought to be a voice of reason or, at least, slightly plausible rhe toric. He cautioned the president against making anti- Communism the stated rationale in his tele vi sion remarks when there was no evidence for it. Bundy pointed out that the Constitutionalist leadership was made up of “military that are with Bosch that nobody says are Communists. . . .  They’re just Dominican col o nels trained under Trujillo, every one of them.”97

“ There were not enough Communists in my country to run a good hotel, let alone the country,” Bosch wrote from his continuing exile in Puerto Rico, mocking U.S. assertions of Communism. When Assistant Secretary of State for Inter- American Affairs Mann argued that in Cuba “ there were only 12 people in the beginning, and yet they took it over,” Bosch pointed out that unlike the minuscule and divided Communist parties in the Dominican Re- public, the Cuban Communist party “was the only efficient, or ga nized po- liti cal force in Cuba at the end of 1958.” By contrast, the Dominican Republic was characterized at the time by strong liberal parties and weak far- left organ izations— and especially weak Communist parties.98

Bosch might also have emphasized the political- sociological differences between the Dominican Republic and Cuba. Despite a growing urban pop- ulation that was behind the Constitutionalist movement, the Dominican Re- public was still a nation of small farmers and of tenants and squatters seeking to be in de pen dent property owners who would have been hostile to any state effort to impose socialism and take away their private prop- erty or their hopes for it. This contrasted sharply with Cuba, where most of the rural and urban populations were wage laborers at the time of the rev- olution’s triumph. Furthermore, the road to Communism became po liti cally feasible among Cubans only in a multistep pro cess when the seismic but still cap i tal ist Cuban reforms aimed at redistributing wealth were met by U.S. ultimatums to reverse those reforms. As we saw, that dialectical pro cess, in which neither side would give in and the confrontation escalated, was what triggered vast new state expropriations of U.S. companies. This, in turn, opened the door to the further socialization of the economy and, to- gether with U.S.- sponsored military threats, even to an intimate, strange new alliance between Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Despite Bundy’s warnings against doing so, the Johnson administration persisted in its campaign of public deception and imperious maneuvering. It had such a sense of power that it sent former ambassador Martin to Puerto Rico to ask Bosch, as the former Dominican president later recalled, “to de- clare that the revolution had fallen into Communist hands, and therefore

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the landing of United States military forces was justified.” “I told Martin that I could not issue the message he was asking for,” Bosch later recalled. But this was not, the ambassador made clear, a request. “Martin answered that I had to make that declaration. My astonishment grew all the more. I said ‘ Pardon me, Mr. Ambassador, I am not an American functionary and Wash- ington cannot dictate what I must do.’ ”99

After the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the U.S. press circulated stories of beheadings, church burning, and other horrors U.S. writers claimed had been perpetrated by Communist rebels. Martin mentioned these, too, when he met with Bosch, who recalled the ambassador saying “that heads had been cut off by the people” and “displayed.” In a public speech in June, Johnson claimed the invasion had become necessary after “some fifteen hundred innocent people were murdered and shot, and their heads cut off.” Afterward Johnson went so far as to ask the U.S. ambassa- dor if he could find any headless cadavers as evidence. No decapitated bod- ies were ever discovered.100

One explanation offered by scholars for the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was that the Johnson administration mistakenly, but gen- uinely, believed that the Constitutionalist movement in some way or another entailed a Communist threat, and that this mistake was the product of in- tense paranoia shaped by the overall Cold War context and the recent Cu- ban Revolution. Reducing U.S. government action to Cold War paranoia, though, does not take into account the extent to which paranoia was mixed with pretense and con ve nient self- deception legitimating less noble mo- tives. Furthermore, from a broader historical perspective, the 1965 U.S. invasion was of a piece with U.S. government policy going far back in time, all the way to 1898: the insistence on dutiful and effective allied leaders in the in de pen dent Ca rib bean and Central Amer i ca. The particularities change over time. In this instance, U.S. officials and corporations rejected Bosch’s 1963 presidency as contrary to U.S. interests, because he insisted on certain land reforms and he refused U.S. demands to repress the coun- try’s Communist parties, however minuscule, marginal, and lawful they were. Bosch’s subsequent resurrection, with the strength of a power ful popu lar movement behind him, was more threatening to perceived U.S. interests. And the civil war endangered the cornerstone of the U.S. version of overseas empire— the power ful U.S.- friendly militaries created during early twentieth- century U.S. occupations. The alarm expressed by U.S. of- ficials over Communism was the refraction of a logical, albeit imperialist, strategic concern about losing influence over what ever developed not only

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in the pre sent moment but also in the future in the Dominican Republic and potentially in other parts of the Ca rib be an.101

With their troops now in control of the Dominican Republic, U.S. offi- cials sought to select new leadership that would be more pliable and con- servative than Bosch. Former U.S. ambassador Martin was brought in to manage the Dominican crisis after the invasion began. During the first week of May, he advised Johnson in blunt neo co lo nial fashion: “If we are going to stay in there, we’re going to need some kind of puppet.” For that role, the U.S. government chose General Antonio Imbert Barreras as head of the new “Government of National Reconstruction.” In contrast to what had hap- pened during the 1916 U.S. invasion of the country, the U.S. occupiers were able to find a cooperative figurehead. This gave U.S. leaders indirect con- trol over the whole country, not just the capital where its troops disem- barked.102

Much to Johnson’s frustration, however, Bosch continued to resist U.S. dictates. When the U.S. president sent an envoy in mid- May to demand that Bosch give up the fight, Bosch refused. The U.S. official complained to John- son: “This fellow Bosch is a complete Latin poet- hero type and he’s com- pletely devoted to this damn constitution.” An enraged Johnson sent another official to deliver a personal message from him: “Tell that son of a bitch that unlike the young man who came before me”— that is, Kennedy— “I am not afraid to use what’s on my hip”— that is, guns. But Bosch continued to ig- nore Washington’s marching orders. And he and the rebels, U.S. observers conceded, were winning the battle for hearts and minds in the Dominican Republic.103

Even with popu lar support, however, the Constitutionalists could not win militarily. In the Santo Domingo neighborhoods where their troops pre- vailed, they were surrounded by U.S. soldiers, cordoned off, and then at- tacked by Dominican Loyalists working with U.S. military advisers. The working- class areas of the city that backed the Constitutionalists were dev- astated by these assaults. The Johnson administration claimed that it was a neutral party, but the real ity of the situation was made vividly clear by one telling detail: the Dominican armed forces continuously played the U.S. national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” on their radio station. Deci- sive for the Loyalist victory, and in contrast to what happened during the first U.S. occupation earlier in the century, there was no rural rebellion against the U.S. invasion. Such an insurrection could potentially have cre- ated, as before, more sustained difficulties for the occupying U.S. forces, es- pecially when combined, unlike then, with an armed urban re sis tance

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movement. This was, though, an altogether dif fer ent time. For one, thanks to the first U.S. occupation— and the subsequent Trujillo dictatorship— the rural population was no longer well- armed, and its once deeply rooted anti- state forces had been vanquished.104

After four months of fighting and negotiation, an accord was hammered out and signed on August 31, 1965. The Constitutionalists were forced to back down from their demand for the return of Bosch. Instead, they agreed to a new provisional civil government presided over by Héctor García Go- doy, a key ally of Balaguer who had been vice president of his Reformist Party. And they agreed to hold elections in the near future. From the point of view of U.S. leaders, their intervention had proceeded smoothly and ef- fectively. The fifty- year- old U.S.- made Dominican army had been reconsoli- dated, and U.S.- trained officers and leaders were now essentially in control of the po liti cal situation. Only a relatively small number of U.S. soldiers had died— a reported forty- four (twenty- seven of whom perished in combat), along with 172 wounded. Not surprisingly, there was little criticism of the invasion by the U.S. public. The 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic foregrounded the continuing power of U.S. empire, an innovative form of empire born out of the War of 1898 based on neither expansion nor colo- nialism but rather on interventions and occupations. The distinction be- tween types of empire mattered little, though, from Bosch’s perspective. U.S. intervention had ensured that the Dominican Republic remained, in his words, a “colonized territory.”105

While perhaps more ideologically palatable for U.S. citizens than outright colonial rule, intervention was not necessarily any less bloody or imperial. In the war between the Constitutionalists and the U.S.- backed Loyalists in the streets of Santo Domingo, hundreds of Loyalists died in the fighting, while an estimated two thousand Constitutionalists and civilians perished and another three thousand were wounded. These deaths occurred not only in the summer of 1965, but also afterward. When Bosch, still holding out hope for a “revolutionary democracy,” returned to Santo Domingo to run for president in the open elections of 1966, the Dominican military re- sponded by murdering hundreds of Bosch supporters. Those slain included not only “po liti cal activists” but also members of the military who had pre- viously sided with the Constitutionalist army. The Dominican armed forces perpetrated these acts of terror against Bosch’s supporters with impunity during a continuing U.S. occupation. In fact, the Dominican military drew on the assistance of the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and U.S. troops throughout the military’s campaign of vio lence.106

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Bosch feared that he himself was in danger of assassination, enough so that he never left his house to campaign. Instead, he broadcast speeches over the radio from his home. These did not have the same charismatic force that his speeches had in 1962, surely not only because of the venue— the im- potence of internal exile— but also because there now seemed little hope for the demo cratic revolution he had earlier sought to lead. Many Domini- cans suspected that Bosch’s cause was hopeless, and, correctly, that support- ing him could be fatal. The CIA had also concluded that the Dominican military would seize power before allowing Bosch to win. Should that hap- pen, there might be a bloody repeat of 1965, one that a large part of the population surely was seeking to avoid. U.S. troops also spread the rumor of a cutoff of all U.S. aid if Bosch won the election. Through its interven- tion and ongoing interference in the election, the U.S. government, in ef- fect, urged Dominicans to accept that the dream of carry ing out popu lar socioeconomic reforms and of true national in de pen dence in a liberal demo- cratic country remained an unrealizable fantasy in what U.S. leaders un- derstood to be the U.S. “backyard.”107

At the same time, Balaguer had some appeal as a candidate to many Do- minicans despite his having been Trujillo’s puppet president in the regime’s final years. Balaguer had actually opposed the coup against Bosch in 1963 and the Triumvirate regime that followed it, and avoided taking a public posi- tion during the civil war. He seemed to promise a continuation of some of Trujillo’s relatively popu lar economic public policies of agrarian reform and rural public works, but without the tyrant’s terrible vio lence. Balaguer skill- fully promised both “social reform” and something that Bosch could not: peace. He was, after all, Washington’s candidate. The United States carried out covert operations in support of Balaguer throughout the campaign, in- cluding financial backing. Perhaps most importantly, the rural majority now threw its support behind Balaguer. With 70  percent of the population rural, one of the highest proportions in Latin Amer i ca and the Ca rib bean at the time, a Balaguer win seemed pos si ble, at least with U.S. help. U.S. covert op- erations included a major effort to bolster election turnout in rural areas.108

In the election on June 1, 1966, Balaguer won with 57  percent of the vote compared with Bosch’s 39  percent. Bosch had prevailed in the capital. But in the countryside, where Bosch had lost much of the popu lar support he had in 1963, Balaguer won a substantial majority. Observers generally concluded that it had been a fair vote, but one that followed a farcically un- fair and repressive campaign on behalf of Balaguer by the Dominican mil- itary with the help of U.S. covert assistance.109

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274 Chapter Six

With the U.S.- backed candidate successfully installed, U.S. troops with- drew from the Dominican Republic. Not only did U.S. interests have a seem- ingly dutiful representative as president of the Dominican Republic, but its government, as historian Frank Moya Pons recounts, was “dominated by some 400 U.S. officials and advisers who were working at every level of pub- lic administration; the military was practically run by a U.S. mission with 65 men.” Another impor tant new lever of control was a rise in U.S. economic assistance as well as a relatively high sugar quota at preferential prices in the U.S. market. There would be devastating economic costs as well as mil- itary and po liti cal threats if the Dominican government did not follow the U.S. line. Dominicans lived now with a sense of an “overwhelming U.S. pres- ence” and a real ity “very close to colonialism.” Bosch himself understood his defeat as a story ultimately of empire: “The 1963 coup generated the 1965 uprising, and that uprising was the opportunity for the United States to take military, po liti cal, and economic control of this country,” he later wrote, and for the Dominican Republic “to replace” Cuba’s former role in the U.S. empire.110

U.S. as well as domestic investment now soared in the Dominican Re- public, given the guarantee of pro- business policies. Foreign investment was particularly concentrated in mining, oil refinement, sugar, and manufac- turing inside free- trade (tariff and tax- free) zones. The U.S. government, it could now be assumed, would make sure that nothing would be national- ized, as might have occurred under a Bosch government and had happened under Trujillo in the 1950s. Realizing that the path to large- scale U.S. in- vestment was open to him, Balaguer provided incentives for a continued influx of capital.

From this position of strength, Balaguer carried out an enormously bloody suppression of leftist opposition. More than a thousand Constitution- alists, journalists, labor leaders, left- wing party members, and other op- ponents were murdered by his regime between 1966 and 1974. Balaguer, though, also secured a substantial mea sure of support and acquiescence in the 1970s among peasants, his erstwhile urban opponents, and business groups. He did so with the help, respectively, of some land distribution mea- sures, co- option through state contracts and employment, and a period of economic growth between 1966 and 1978 that was among the highest in the world. That growth permitted expansion in both private and public sectors in ways that were po liti cally useful. Engineers from opposition parties, for instance, were given public works contracts, and over a thousand profes- sors and others gained employment at the Autonomous University of Santo

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Domingo. Although Balaguer had campaigned and secured votes primar- ily in the countryside, he put money increasingly into the cities, especially into urban public works. This generated employment and showed develop- ment in the capital, building some support for Balaguer even among those who had fought against him fiercely and voted for Bosch. Members of the Dominican Communist party even participated in the regime, helping to implement certain agrarian reform mea sures, and Balaguer eventually fully legalized the party. This was, of course, another profound irony, given that Bosch’s refusal to persecute members of Communist parties was one of the main rationales for U.S. opposition to his administration in 1963. The Balaguer state’s anti- leftist vio lence, only moderate reforms, and pro- U.S. stance gave him more room to maneuver.111

Yet while Balaguer perpetuated Trujillo’s rural populist discourse, he ne- glected rural roads, irrigation, and other needed infrastructure, imposed discriminatory pricing policies that hurt agriculturalists, and offered minimal credit for small farming. In that context, land distributed by the Balaguer regime to peasants was increasingly useless. A large portion of the areas given out fell idle, and more than a third of its beneficiaries were obliged to turn to wage labor for complementary income. As a result, by 1980 only 36  percent of occupied land was held by small and medium farm- ers compared with 70  percent in 1960 (even after the sugar expansion of the 1950s). A country that had been nearly self- sufficient in agriculture under Trujillo was moving in a dif fer ent direction, importing an estimated one- fourth of its food by the early 1980s.112

Following years of state repression and co- option, the Dominican Revo- lutionary Party that Bosch had once led moved to a centrist rather than left- wing orientation. It renounced key goals, such as nationalization of the remaining large U.S. sugar com pany, the Central Romana, then owned by Gulf and Western. And it put forward a conservative candidate for the 1978 election, Antonio Guzmán, a prominent landowner with personal connec- tions to both Dominican businessmen and U.S. foreign policy leaders. The party was now seeking po liti cal liberalization but neither socioeconomic re- forms nor more in de pen dence from U.S. influence. As a result, it garnered support among those seeking democ ratization without threats to existing economic interests and aspirations.113

On election night in 1978, soldiers nonetheless stopped the vote count- ing when it looked like Balaguer was going to lose. The chief of police and the secretary of the armed forces supported a military coup. But numerous generals and po liti cal officials hesitated. Protesters poured into the streets.

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276 Chapter Six

And in this case, the U.S. government took a stand against a military coup to forestall Guzmán’s demo cratic victory. At the U.S. State Department’s re- quest, the head of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama reportedly phoned the Dominican secretary of the armed forces to impress upon him the seriousness of U.S. opposition, indicating that it would not recognize a government brought to power by a coup to block Guzmán. In the face of U.S. as well as domestic pressure against a coup, the Dominican military gave in and let the election of Guzmán proceed— but not entirely. In return for accepting Guzmán’s presidential victory, Balaguer insisted on an illegal reversal of the electoral outcome in four Senate races, so that his Reform Party could retain a majority in the Senate and its control over the appoint- ment of judges.114

Why, in this case, did the United States intervene forcefully to support democracy, at least at the presidential level, when a military coup was threatened? Perhaps this reflected a more demo cratic impulse under the new U.S. president, Jimmy Car ter. Also key, though, was that by 1978 the major left- wing Dominican organ izations either had been decimated or were no longer advocating major economic reforms or nationalist positions. The Dominican Revolutionary Party was not the social demo cratic party it had once been. In this context, the U.S. government did not have to choose be- tween support for demo cratic elections and opposition to a candidate who might win in a fair vote but was considered nonetheless unacceptable to Washington— too in de pen dent from the United States, as Bosch had been seen by U.S. leaders.

The po liti cal system in the Dominican Republic began a steady pro cess toward liberal democracy after 1978, however imperfect it would long re- main in terms of fully fair elections and civil rights. What was not achieved and had become harder to imagine were the substantive socioeconomic im- provements that so many had long craved. The economy continued to move in the direction Balaguer had set: expanding foreign investment, tour- ism, free- trade zones, and remittances from Dominican emigrants. All this further weakened the state’s concern with the peasantry and with agricul- ture in general. At the same time, rural Dominicans’ growing contact with the city and international currents gave rise to new needs and desires for education and consumer goods, while schools and public ser vices in the countryside suffered from state neglect. Large numbers migrated to the cit- ies in search of new opportunities. In 1981, for the first time in Dominican history, the nation’s population was primarily urban.115

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But in urban as well as rural areas, Dominicans would face desperate con- ditions: dreadful health care, limited periods of electricity, increasing crime, and ubiquitous graft and corruption across the state. The lack of de- cent economic opportunities and conditions in the Dominican Republic pushed hundreds of thousands of Dominicans to migrate to the United States. In certain re spects, conditions in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s represented the polar opposite of those in Cuba, where there were none of the desired po liti cal rights and civil liberties— the po liti cal freedoms people also craved— but welcome socioeconomic equality, well- being, and security that were remarkable for a lower- income nation.116

Life in 1980s Communist Cuba

By the 1980s, Cuba’s Communist society had become relatively successful in socioeconomic terms. There was an impressive degree of guaranteed mate- rial well- being, a high level of equity, and extraordinary human capital that helped drive a solid economy overall. At the same time, no real exter- nal or internal po liti cal threats prevailed, and that corresponded, it seems, with a substantial decline in the number of po liti cal prisoners, even while tight repression continued.117

Cuba’s relatively prosperous economy was highly dependent on Soviet trade and aid. By replacing the United States in 1961 as the guaranteed pur- chaser of Cuban sugar at preferential prices, the Soviet Union had insu- lated the Cuban economy from the devastating impact of the U.S. trade embargo. As importantly, perhaps, the U.S.S.R. protected Cuba from billions of dollars’ worth of annual losses after the world market price of oil sky- rocketed in 1973 by partially maintaining the preexisting terms of trade be- tween the two economies. Despite an almost tenfold increase in oil prices between 1973 and 1982, and a concomitant decrease in world sugar prices, the purchasing power of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil was only halved. Cuban leaders used this support effectively. In the 1960s, Cuba’s economy devel- oped slowly, but in the 1970s and in the early 1980s, its growth rate was ro- bust and appears to have outstripped that of Latin Amer i ca overall.118

The clearest form of development in Cuban society between 1960 and 1990 is shown in quality-of-life indicators. Prior to the revolution, figures for health and education in Cuba were already high for Latin Amer i ca and the Ca rib bean. Yet socialist Cuba was able to continue improving these levels, both in absolute terms and compared with other countries in

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278 Chapter Six

the region, despite not expanding its relative per capita national income. High- quality health care and schooling became available to a far larger part of the population than ever before, including the remotest areas and formerly poorest neighborhoods. Cuba developed a world- class health care system and an abundance— surplus, even—of doctors. By the 1980s, Cuba had the highest life expectancy and the lowest level of infant mortality in Latin Amer i ca, with both roughly the same as those in the United States. In 1980, life expectancy was seventy- three years in Cuba and seventy- four in the United States, in contrast, for instance, to sixty- one years and fifty- three years in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, respectively. Most dra- matically, Cuba had evened out the once- stark inequities of medical care across class and the rural- urban divide.119

Similar investment in education almost eliminated illiteracy, dropping from a rate of 23  percent before the revolution to less than 8  percent of those ages fifteen and older by 1985. Only 4.5  percent of the labor force had a high school education in 1953 versus 38.7 in 1986. And university enrollment in 1983— roughly 200,000— was some ten times what it had been before the revolution.120

Although the statistics we have for income distribution are far from per- fect, it is clear that Cuba went from being one of the most unequal nations in the Amer i cas in the 1950s to being one of the most equal in the 1970s. Fur- thermore, by 1981 an extraordinary degree of socioeconomic parity across race had been achieved in key areas— health, education, and employment— a stark contrast from pre-1959 Cuba and other former slave socie ties, notably Brazil and the United States. Nonetheless, there remained significant fail- ings in the Cuban government’s legislation and discourses addressing racial in equality. Certain spaces of discrimination continued, as in the criminal justice system, where incarceration rates were grossly unequal. And preju- dice was far from eliminated, however much it was silenced. Critiques of extant forms of racism— like critiques of the regime in general— were also silenced, making their defeat more difficult and improbable.121

The course of Cuban history, though, would change radically, once again, with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in the early 1990s. When the old Soviet trade deals and aid were eliminated, the U.S. economic embargo began to have the intended devastating effect on the Cuban nation. Cuba faced an almost unimaginable blow at this time— the loss of three- fourths of its im- ports along with two- thirds of exports in just four years (1989–93). Because Cuba had never transcended the old plantation structure reliant on exporting

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essentially one crop to one key purchaser at preferential prices, its seemingly robust socialist economy remained nonetheless as dependent and vulner- able as the economy had been before the revolution.122 The promise of sim- ply changing one buyer for another, the Soviet Union for the United States, had been understandably seductive in that moment. But the Cuban Revolu- tion’s deal with the plantation devil worked only until it didn’t. Cuba’s economy all but died within a few years of the end of the Soviet trade and support, which the island had depended upon since the U.S. government prohibited Cuban sugar imports.

Facing economic collapse, the regime opened up forms of free enterprise and engaged in more state cap i tal ist endeavors, such as tourism. And the government cut back on the socioeconomic benefits to which Cubans had grown accustomed. It would and could no longer ensure the same level of material well- being as in the past or the same degree of control over em- ployment, wages, and promotions in the new hybrid economy. Novel struc- tures of racial in equality also emerged. Because emigrants had been disproportionately white, lighter- skinned Cubans received more remittances from family members abroad. And white Cubans profited, too, from better housing stock in attractive neighborhoods, a legacy of prerevolutionary Cuba, in which to open restaurants in their homes.123

Cubans may yet gain the possibility of choosing public policies, freedoms, and po liti cal leaders desired by the majority of their population, rather than having them circumscribed by repressive Cuban and hostile U.S. govern- ments. Still, old conflicts will remain on the island over national in de pen- dence, how land should be used, and how to develop an economic model that fulfills popu lar aspirations for material well- being without sacrificing liberal freedoms that people also crave.

Cuba’s seeming socioeconomic triumphs had been inspiring to many in the Ca rib bean in the 1960s and 1970s. These triumphs came, though, at the high price of never securing po liti cal freedom and of breaking relations with the superpower ninety miles away with which it shared deep economic and cultural ties. After the Cuban Revolution, many in the Ca rib bean, such as Juan Bosch, would seek to chart a dif fer ent path and avoid those costs, which would also eventually include the near collapse of the Cuban economy.

The rupture between the United States and Cuba stemmed to a large de- gree from U.S. leaders’ unwillingness to accept the Cuban government’s egalitarian public policies, policies that hit U.S. interests hard. This left the Cuban government with little room to maneuver vis- à- vis popu lar demands

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280 Chapter Six

for agrarian and other reforms and its own overall left- wing ideals. The his- tory of U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, which prevented the restoration of a demo cratically elected reformist government, did not sug- gest much hope, either, for a dif fer ent way of addressing the yearnings of people in the Ca rib bean for change. Yet the approach pursued during the Bosch era in the Dominican Republic, despite failure, was still for many the last best hope.

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