Beginning in 1933 successive Cuban governments depended on the support of military strongman Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973). In 1940 Batista was elected president in his own right. After completing a four-year term of office, he stepped down after he was defeated in a democratic election. In 1952 Batista ran for president again. Defeated for a second time, he overthrew the constitutional government and established a regime even more corrupt and repressive than those of his predecessors.
Platt Amendment Annulled
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Franklin D. Roosevelt annulled the Platt Amendment in 1934 as part of his “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America. Revoking the amendment made little practical difference. America still maintained a naval base at Guantanamo Bay. As Cuba’s biggest trade partner, the United States continued to meddle in Cuban affairs.
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FIDEL CASTRO
The son of a prosperous sugarcane farmer, Fidel Castro (1926–2016) was a committed political activist before he was twenty. While studying law at the University of Havana, Castro joined an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow General Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and took part in street riots in Colombia. After he received his degree in 1950, he seemed to settle down. He opened a law practice in Havana and became a member of a moderate reform party, the Cuban People’s Party, also known as the Ortodoxos. He ran as that party’s candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives in the 1952 elections.
Castro reverted to revolutionary tactics after Batista’s 1952 coup. When legal means to overturn Batista failed, Castro attempted to start a revolution by attacking the Moncada military barracks with a group of 160 men on July 26, 1953. The attempt was a total failure. Most of the attackers were killed. Castro and his brother Raúl were arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Released two years later as part of a general amnesty, the brothers went into self-imposed exile in Mexico, where they trained a small revolutionary force.
In late 1956 a small yacht landed Castro, Raúl, and a rebel force of eighty-one men on the southeastern coast of Cuba. The so-called 26th of July Movement was routed and almost destroyed by Batista’s security forces. A dozen survivors retreated to the Sierra Maestra mountains and began a guerilla war against the Batista dictatorship. Over the next year they recruited more insurgents and built alliances with other revolutionary groups, including disaffected liberal politicians. By 1958 Batista’s regime was in trouble. Several of his military leaders joined the revolutionaries. The United States government withdrew its support, hoping to reach an agreement with the revolutionary forces similar to the one it had with Batista and his predecessors. After all, political coups were nothing new in Cuba.
In December 1958 Batista fled the country, leaving Castro in power as the undisputed leader of the revolution.
Castro Rebuilds Cuba
Over the next few years Castro and the 26th of July Movement created the first socialist country in the Americas. Castro’s initial program wasn’t explicitly socialist. Its major features were land reforms and progressive tax policies aimed at foreign investors, the sugar industry, large businesses, and the tourist industries of Havana. Not surprisingly, he quickly gained a following of peasants, urban workers, and leftists of all varieties. The propertied classes were less enthusiastic. Many of them left Cuba for the United States.
Over the course of 1959 and 1960 Castro nationalized foreign businesses, established a centrally planned economy, and brought basic social services to poor and rural areas. In February 1960 he signed a trade deal with the Soviet Union. Already angry about the loss of nationalized property, the United States retaliated for Castro’s new relationship with Russia by imposing a trade embargo, plotting to assassinate Castro, and supporting an unsuccessful invasion attempt by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. America’s hard-line attitude only made Castro more popular in Cuba and forced him to become increasingly dependent on Soviet trade policies.
VIETNAM
The Radicalization of a Generation
The word Vietnam came to symbolize to a generation growing conflicts that divided the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. To some, it meant the United States carrying out its duty to protect smaller nations from threats by communists. To others, it meant a brutal war against a people struggling for freedom. In the leadership of Vietnam’s quest for independence was a small, withered old man with an iron will: Ho Chi Minh.
HO CHI MINH AND THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE
Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), born Nguyen Sinh Cung, grew up in the French possession of Indochina. Formed in 1887, French Indochina originally included Cambodia and the Vietnamese regions of Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina. Laos was added in 1893. Ho’s father was a scholar who lost his position due to his political views. He scraped together a meager living writing and reading letters for illiterate peasants.
Ho received a French education and spent several years as a schoolteacher. In 1911, at the age of twenty-one, he decided to join the navy and see the world. He spent three years working as a cook on a French steamer. After living in London for several years, he moved to France, where he became an active socialist and anti-colonial activist. Working under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), he organized a group of expatriate Vietnamese and was one of the founders of the French Communist Party. In 1919 he addressed a petition to the Versailles Peace Conference calling on the French to give their Indochinese subjects equal rights. The members of the conference ignored him, but he caught the attention of politically conscious Vietnamese as someone to watch.
Ho left France in 1923. He spent the next ten years traveling between communist strongholds and organizing expatriate Vietnamese nationalists. In 1924 he played an active role in the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, taking the French Communist Party to task for not opposing colonialism more vigorously. Later that year he traveled to Canton, China, under the assumed name of Ly Thuy, where he organized Vietnamese nationalists who had been exiled from Indochina for their political beliefs into the Viet Nam Thanh Nien Cach Menh Dong Chi Hoi (Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Association), better known as the Thanh Nien. When Chiang Kai-shek expelled the communists from Canton in 1927, Ho went on the road again, traveling to Moscow, Brussels, and Paris before settling in Siam (now Thailand) as the Comintern’s representative in Southeast Asia.
In 1930 Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam to preside over the formation of the Indochinese Communist Party (PCI), which was organized by members of the Thanh Nien and activists in Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon.
WORLD WAR II AND THE FORMATION OF VIETNAM
In 1940 France signed an armistice with Germany, establishing the rule of the Vichy government, and Japan invaded Indochina for the first time. Seeing an opportunity, Ho Chi Minh returned secretly to Indochina in January 1941, then returned to South China, where he organized the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi (League for the Independence of Vietnam), popularly known as the Viet Minh.
Notebook from Prison
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Imprisoned by Chiang Kai-shek for eighteen months in 1941–1942, Ho wrote Notebook from Prison, a collection of short poems written in classical Chinese using a traditional Vietnamese verse form. Beginning with the line “It is your body which is in prison/Not your mind,” the collection describes prison life and calls out for revolution.
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In 1945 the Japanese overran Indochina and imprisoned or executed all the French officials. Ho contacted the United States forces and began to collaborate with the Office of Strategic Services against the Japanese. At the same time Viet Minh guerrillas fought the Japanese in the mountains of South China while groups of commandos began to move toward the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 14, 1945. The Viet Minh entered Hanoi on August 19. Two weeks later Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence to an enormous crowd in Ba Dinh Square.
Independence wasn’t that simple. An Allied treaty with Chiang Kai-shek gave the Chinese Nationa
lists the right to replace the Japanese north of the Sixteenth Parallel. Not surprisingly, liberated France, under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle, had no intention of giving up Indochina without a fight.
The French quickly recaptured South Vietnam and began negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. Neither side was satisfied with the final agreement, which recognized Vietnam as an independent state with its own government, army, and finances, integrated into a French union controlled by Paris.
The uneasy peace flared into war in November 1946, when a French cruiser opened fire on the town of Haiphong after a clash between French and Vietnamese soldiers. By the end of 1953 most of the countryside was under Viet Minh control and the country’s larger cities were under siege. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 ended France’s Southeast Asian empire.
Ho and American Independence
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Was Ho Chi Minh familiar with the Declaration of Independence? Very likely. The words Ho used to announce Vietnam’s independence sound very similar to Thomas Jefferson’s: “All men are born equal: the Creator has given us inviolable rights: life, liberty and happiness.”
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VIETNAM DIVIDED
The Geneva Accords, signed on July 21, 1954, divided Vietnam at the Seventeenth Parallel, creating a communist state in the north, led by Ho Chi Minh, and an anti-communist state in the south, led by Ngo Dinh Diem. The division of Vietnam created a Cold War battlefront, with the United States supporting Ngo Dinh Diem and the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China providing aid to Ho Chi Minh.
The Accords called for a 1956 election that would reestablish a unified Vietnam. When the time came for the elections, South Vietnam refused to play, setting the stage for the United States’ entry into the Vietnam War.
THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT IN THE US
Although most Americans remained relatively unaware of their country’s growing involvement in Vietnam, by the middle of the 1960s one factor had changed this significantly: television. Night after night, images of young men at war were broadcast. As President Lyndon Johnson relied more and more on the draft to create a steady supply of soldiers whom he could send to Vietnam, resistance steadily grew. By 1967 the movement against the war had taken shape and begun to vigorously express itself.
The 1967 Marches
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In 1967 two massive protests of the war occurred. The first, in April, was held in New York, where some 400,000 people marched from Central Park to the United Nations. At the second, held in Washington, DC, in October, marchers attempted to encircle the Pentagon.
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In 1968 protests against the war turned violent at the Democratic National Convention. In what was later described in an official report as a “police riot,” Chicago police beat demonstrators and reporters. In the words of some, the war had come home.
Although Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, publicly claimed not to be influenced by the protests, internal documents of both administrations show they were deeply concerned by them. Equally distressing to them was the fact that the protest activity was exposing many young people to more radical notions about what was wrong with society. Socialist organizations in the 1960s and early 1970s showed a steady growth, primarily from people disillusioned by the war.
SOCIALISM AND THE “NEW LEFT”
Rediscovery of Socialism
Socialism enjoyed a brief resurgence in America in the 1960s and early 1970s. A New Left emerged from the interaction between the civil rights movement and the socialist movement of the 1930s (which became known as the Old Left), as well as protests against the Vietnam War. Composed largely of college students, the New Left refused to be drawn into the communist–anti-communist dichotomy that characterized the Old Left. Their initial concerns were racism and poverty, but these quickly took a back seat to protests against the Vietnam War. The movement peaked in the mid-1960s and had virtually disappeared by the mid-1970s.
SDS
The most well-known New Left organization was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Founded in 1960 as a student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy, SDS quickly broke away from the Marxist dogmatism of its founding organization.
In 1962 the SDS held a national convention in Port Huron, Michigan, to create its own operating manifesto. After several days of discussion the society adopted the Port Huron Statement, written for the most part by University of Michigan student newspaper editor Tom Hayden, who later rose to national prominence as one of the eight young men charged with inciting riots around the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The manifesto drew on a range of socialist and political traditions, from the town hall meeting to Marx. The statement began with a critique of American society that dealt with race relations, the persistence of poverty, and America’s role in the Cold War. It then outlined the organization’s vision of reform based on a loosely defined concept of “participatory democracy.”
Participatory Democracy
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The SDS idea of “participatory democracy” grew out of the writings of John Dewey, as elaborated by University of Michigan professor Arnold Kaufman. The basic idea, as expressed by Dewey, is that “all those who are affected by social institutions must have a share in producing and managing them.”
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SDS grew slowly until 1965, when the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War escalated. In 1962 the group had roughly three hundred members; estimates of the organization’s membership at its highest point range from 30,000 to 100,000. After the party organized a mass antiwar march on Washington in April 1965, the organization grew more militant: staging student strikes and occupying university administration buildings.
At its 1969 convention the organization disintegrated as the result of a power struggle between the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the Progressive Labor Party. Members of the Revolutionary Youth Movement expelled the more moderate faction from the party. A number of members unaffiliated with either faction resigned in disgust, leaving the party in the hands of its most radical element. Soon thereafter, the remaining members transformed themselves into the violent revolutionary group, the Weathermen.
REACTION
Reaganism and Neoliberalism
The election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States signaled a sharp turn to the right in American politics. Reagan found a kindred spirit in the UK’s Margaret Thatcher, and both of them set out to privatize those segments of their economies that had been nationalized.
NEOLIBERALISM
To a large extent both Reagan and Thatcher found inspiration in the ideas of Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century economist whose central tenet was the “invisible hand” of the marketplace. Smith’s twentieth-century followers argued that less government was better and the smaller the role government played in the economy, the healthier the nation’s economic situation would become. Reagan summed up his views in the statement “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Socialists had argued that the role of government was to administer a fair distribution of economic resources. Neoliberals argued that the process occurred naturally, without the intervention of government. While socialists suggested that higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy, could help pay the cost of social programs such as healthcare and education, neoliberals retorted that lowering taxes accomplished two ends:
• It put more money in the hands of working people, allowing them to increase spending and thus create more jobs.
• It put more money in the hands of wealthy people, the real job creators. If the tax burden on the rich and corporations was reduced, neoliberals argued, the result would be a “trickle-down effect.” Money given to the top echelons of society would trickle down to the bottom through increased job creation.
The Chicago School
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Among the most enthusiastic supporters of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman (1912–2006), a professor of ec
onomics at the University of Chicago. Friedman argued that the most important measure of a country’s economic health was the rate at which the money supply was increasing. When the government of Chile fell to a military coup, led by General Augusto Pinochet, in late 1973, Friedman (among others) became an advisor to the Chilean dictatorship. The result was a series of moves that enriched Chile’s elites while impoverishing the working class. It was the Pinochet government’s policies that enshrined the word neoliberalism in economists’ vocabularies.
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Reaganism in Practice
Reagan put this doctrine into practice in the 1990s in the United States. While the economy experienced growth, there were two significant consequences:
1. Military spending increased vastly due to the administration’s emphasis on defense.
2. The national deficit ballooned. Neoliberals argued that the deficit (the difference between what the government spends and what it takes in) didn’t matter, since it would shortly start to go down because of economic growth. This didn’t happen, and Reagan added $1.4 trillion in deficits.
REAGAN CONSERVATISM
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