by Patrick Iber
Jorge Mañach was an essayist and author with social democratic political views and an early biographer of the poet and martyr of Cuban independence, José Martí. Mañach was entrusted by Castro with editing the speech that made his name, “History Will Absolve Me,” during Castro’s imprisonment in 1954. After the revolution he initially defended Castro, but by 1960 he left for exile in Puerto Rico and died there in 1961.
Mario Llerena was a journalist and propagandist for Castro’s 26th of July Movement in the United States. He broke with Castro in the months before his victory and became a fierce critic, returning to Cuba briefly in 1959 and 1960 before joining the middle-class exodus to Miami, where he remained for decades as a member of the rabidly anti-Castro exile community.
Raúl Roa was a student radical in the 1930s who grew to be a philosophy professor and dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Havana. In the mid-1950s he edited Humanismo, and after the revolution he became Cuba’s representative to the Organization of American States and then its foreign minister. He defended its foreign policy with such distinction that he was nicknamed the “Chancellor of Dignity.”
Aureliano Sánchez Arango was an ex-Communist and former minister of education with close ties to the anti-Communist Left. He was involved in many military conspiracies, including international ventures to topple Caribbean dictators, and headed a small group of anti-Batista fighters in the mid-1950s. Forced out of Cuba in 1960, he joined up with CIA efforts to overthrow Castro’s government.
Four different paths through the Cuban Revolution—different forms of support and opposition—and one common biographical fact: all four men had been important figures in the Cuban national affiliate of the CCF, the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom. That four such divergent trajectories could all, for a brief time in the late 1950s, intersect in an anti-Communist cultural organization reveals not confusion and betrayal but the strategic ambiguity of the politics of Cuba’s revolution. These ambiguities sprang from the revolution’s deep and tangled roots and the failure of Cuba’s social democrats to deliver either socialism or democracy.
There is some irony in the fact that it was Cuba that captured the international imagination of what it meant to be “Latin American,” for Cuba’s history had long diverged in important ways from that of the rest of the region. Along with Puerto Rico, it remained a Spanish colony nearly eighty years longer than the rest of Spanish America. Its independence in 1898, in the wake of the war between the United States and Spain that interrupted Cuba’s own anticolonial struggle, came at a moment when voices in the United States were debating the merits of formal empire. Although some in the United States hoped to annex the island and others pledged to support its independence, a compromise emerged that left Cuba formally independent but less than fully sovereign, governed by the Platt Amendment, in which the United States reserved the right to intervene whenever the Cuban government failed to maintain “a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” Military occupations during the Platt Amendment years ensured that many forms of Cuban nationalism would direct anti-imperial ire against the United States, even as geographic proximity made it logical for the two countries to maintain close economic, cultural, and political relationships. As in other countries in Central America and the Caribbean in the early decades of the twentieth century, U.S. intervention in Cuba’s domestic affairs was the norm rather than the exception and, as elsewhere, resulted in dictatorships that could maintain good investment climates for U.S. businesses rather than democracy.5
The first dictatorship to produce a generation of resisters was that of Gerardo Machado, after 1929. Machado had subverted Cuba’s political institutions to take a second term as president and found himself facing multiple opposition groups. The Communist Party of Cuba, which drew supporters from the working and lower-middle class, was among them. But there were many others. In 1931, for instance, a group of upper-middle-class professionals, under the meaningless and inscrutable name ABC, engaged in bombings and propaganda. Jorge Mañach, who in the 1950s would be active in the CCF, was the ABC’s principal spokesman, issuing manifestos calling for a new regime of social justice and political liberty, including the nationalization of industries that tended toward monopoly. Students, not the middle-class ABC, bore the brunt of the repression of Machado’s state apparatus, including extrajudicial killing. Even exile did not guarantee safety. The Communist Julio Antonio Mella was gunned down on the streets of Mexico City in 1929 while he walked with his lover, Tina Modotti. Students at the University of Havana formed revolutionary groups, issuing manifestos proclaiming liberation from foreign political and economic domination and the domestic tyranny that abetted and enacted that imperialism. One of the groups, the Ala Izquierda Estudiantial, produced a number of significant political leaders: Aureliano Sánchez Arango, Raúl Roa, and Carlos Prío, who all would go on to important roles in subsequent Cuban governments. The Ala advocated agrarian revolution and anti-imperialism, and many of its members, including Sánchez Arango, joined the Communist Party.6
When Machado was eventually forced to resign, the resulting political void was filled by a young sergeant named Fulgencio Batista, who staged a military revolt and then stepped back to allow a scholarly medical doctor named Ramón Grau San Martín to become president. Grau refused to swear to the constitution that included the Platt Amendment, ending the years of constitutionally compromised sovereignty. Grau’s government frightened many powerful economic interests by quickly implementing a number of left-wing reforms: a minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, guarantees of collective bargaining, women’s suffrage, and university autonomy. He also set a minimum requirement for Cuban participation in foreign firms operating in Cuba. But Grau’s government fell after a few short months—the United States maneuvered for his removal—and Batista remained the real power in Cuban politics for the remainder of the 1930s. Out of power, Grau formed a new party, the social democratic Partido Revolucionario Cubano-Auténtico. Claiming the “authentic” mantle of the poet-martyr of Cuban independence, José Martí, its members were known as Auténticos.7
In 1939, facing considerable political pressure, Batista consented to a constitutional convention. A democratic and reformist consensus prevailed; even Cuba’s Communist Party sent delegates to the convention, where they helped craft some of the document’s more progressive clauses, including the right to work, strike, and unionize. Jorge Mañach was a member of the constitutional assembly, where he advocated for the inclusion of social services as constitutional rights. In the end, Cuba’s constitution of 1940 was social democratic, guaranteeing individual rights but assigning the government the responsibility for seeing to social rights and welfare. Not unlike the Mexican constitution of 1917, it was one of the world’s most progressive on paper, although the state had neither the will nor the capacity to fulfill the commitments made there.8
In 1940, after six years as the unofficial power behind the Cuban presidency, Batista was legitimately elected to the office. Carrying out a populist program, he made Cuba a close ally of the United States during World War II. Batista’s wartime Popular Front government included members of the Cuban Communist Party, which Batista had legalized in 1938, and which Batista placed in charge of constructing a unified labor federation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC). In tune with moderating currents during the war, the Cuban Communist Party gave itself the more tranquil name Partido Socialista Popular in 1943. The residual effect of Batista’s alliance with the PSP was that he retained a good name among Latin American Communists and, for example, was honored at the peace conference held in Mexico City in 1949.9
In elections in 1944, Grau was elected president, and for the next eight years the island was governed by Auténticos during a brief era that had the patina of an electoral democracy. But Cuba’s Congress scarcely met, and Grau governed largely by executive decree. While observing formal freedoms, his government permitted high levels
of corruption and gangsterism. The University of Havana was notorious for the presence of armed gangs, shielded by Grau’s reliance on student support and abusing his commitment to the principle of university autonomy. (Fidel Castro, who began studying at the university in 1945, later said that it was more dangerous there than in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.) And, like Batista’s before him, Grau’s ministers used their sinecures to assemble a vast system of spoils and personal benefits.
Internationally, the consequences of Grau’s supposedly “social democratic” views were somewhat more visible. He aligned his government with the Central American and Caribbean antidictatorial reformers of the Caribbean Legion. Many political exiles from dictatorships elsewhere in Latin America lived in Havana during the Auténtico years, where the corruption in public finances aided their acquisition of arms. In 1947, with Grau’s encouragement, a force to invade the Dominican Republic and depose the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo was established off the coast of Cuba. A young Fidel Castro joined the approximately one thousand expeditionaries-in-waiting—apparently against the wishes of his mother, who offered him a car and a trip to the United States if he stayed and established his law practice. After the Cuban government laundered $1 million through the Ministry of Education to support the force, the Cuban army decided to shut down the expedition, and its participants were briefly detained. Awaiting arrest on board ship, Castro threw himself into shark-infested waters rather than be apprehended.10
Grau’s labor minister, Carlos Prío Socarrás, was elected to succeed him in 1948. Prío committed himself to cleaning up corruption and gangsterism, appointing Aureliano Sánchez Arango, his former companion from their days as student radicals, as minister of education. Sánchez Arango oversaw mass firings in an attempt to curtail some of the illicit activity that had proliferated during Grau’s presidency. But although Prío was able to create some of the institutions that would make it possible to implement the constitution of 1940 vigorously, such as a national bank, he too did so while accumulating an enormous bounty of personal wealth and made little progress in reducing the power of armed political gangs.11
Although Grau’s and Prío’s actions in office did much to discredit the idea of democratic reform in Cuba, Prío especially acted as a member of the Latin American anti-Communist Democratic Left. After the coup in Venezuela in 1948 that deposed the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, Gallegos and Acción Democrática party leader Rómulo Betancourt resettled in Havana. In 1950 Prío’s government hosted and sponsored the continental conference that brought together the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IADF). Prío understood the symbolic politics of the early Cold War very well, arresting a group of Mexicans—including Vicente Lombardo Toledano and David Álfaro Siqueiros—who passed through Havana en route to a peace congress in Europe. Prío also met with Julián Gorkin and El Campesino during their travels to promote the latter’s ghostwritten autobiography. Sánchez Arango, Prío’s minister of education, was elected to be first vice president of the IADF and was especially active in coordinating conspiracies within the regional anti-Communist Left.12
Auténtico anti-Communism had more repressive dimensions as well. Because Batista had ceded labor organizing to Communist organizers, Prío was determined to push aside the leadership of the major union confederation, the CTC. For this, Grau and Prío turned to Eusebio Mujal, an ex- and strong anti-Communist. Beginning in 1946, after a meeting in Miami with the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) Serafino Romualdi, Mujal began to plan the removal of Communists from power in the CTC. In 1947 he engineered a coup within the union federation that forced out the old leadership. In 1949 he placed himself at its head and dominated the organization until 1958. Mujal made a mockery of responsible union leadership: corrupt, venal, and thuggish, he too accumulated a vast personal fortune. He was also one of the most important players in the creation of the “antitotalitarian” Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT) that was supposed to represent the “democratic” alternative to rival union federations like Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina; with a subsidy from Prío’s government, the CTC was the greatest financial contributor to ORIT other than the U.S. union federations.13
Fed up with corruption, some former Auténticos split to form rival parties, dividing Cuba’s anti-Communist Left. In 1947, a popular and bombastic radio broadcaster, Eduardo Chibás, created the Partido Ortodoxo, and some social democrats, like Jorge Mañach, joined. So too did Fidel Castro, becoming a leader in the youth division of the party. Ortodoxo plans fell apart when Chibás accused Aureliano Sánchez Arango of corruption. When the education minister denied the charges and Chibás failed to provide the evidence he had promised, he shot himself on the air, lingering for days before passing away. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans filled the streets to mourn Chibás at his funeral, and Castro reportedly contemplated using the crowd to launch a mass insurrection to topple the government of Prío.14
Without Chibás, who many had thought would be the next president, the Ortodoxos and Auténticos contested the 1952 election, while another candidate languished far behind: former president Fulgencio Batista. In spite of the problems facing the two established parties, Batista realized that the electoral path to recapture power held no promise for him, and so he engineered another coup. Eusebio Mujal, after briefly approving a general strike, made a bargain with Batista that allowed him to stay in power, maintaining his sinecure at the price of union autonomy. Mujal’s actions were strongly criticized by many within ORIT, but the CTC defeated efforts to label Batista’s government a dictatorship and call for the restoration of civil liberties and rights. Throughout the 1950s Mujal subordinated the CTC to Batista’s governments and then insisted that Batista deserved support because—unlike totalitarian governments under the Soviet yoke—he allowed workers their “independent” union organizations. A “CTC in exile” drew up a damning bill of particulars showing government collaboration, including the destruction of unions, intimidation, unlawful firing, murder of antigovernment labor leaders, strike suppression, and official theft from social security funds. Mujal also used this “independence” to have his workers disrupt actions during the eventual armed struggle against Batista.15
After his return to office, Batista eschewed his earlier populism, focusing less on enacting reforms that would maintain support and more on enriching himself. With CIA assistance he intensified the efforts of Prío’s anti-Communist police force, inaugurating the unguardedly titled Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities in 1954 for the specific purpose of battling Communism in Cuba. Only much later was the CIA willing to recognize that the bureau would become, under Batista, a tool of repression to squeeze the opposition, Communist or otherwise.16
Opposition to dictatorship might have provided an opportunity for the Auténticos and the Ortodoxos, both ostensibly committed to democracy, a chance at unity, but that did not occur. Hard-line Ortodoxos, including Castro, rejected a negotiated pact between the two parties. As in the Machado years, the opposition to Batista’s dictatorship created diverse opposition groups among the political classes, the Communist Party, the students, and even business elites who tired of Batista’s corruption. Although Che Guevara, in an act of deliberate self-mythologizing, later tried to leave the world an image of the mountain guerrilla uprising that cascaded to victory, this was not an accurate rendering of the process of the Cuban Revolution. Urban warfare was more important in keeping the regime off balance than were the guerrillas throughout most of the 1950s, and Castro began as just one leader among many. His eventual victory had much to do with lucky elimination of other claimants to power (urban warfare proved more dangerous than the guerrilla struggle), his military success, and skillful media relations that consolidated his hegemony within the opposition to Batista. But the roots of his eventual differences with the anti-Communist Left lay deep in the history of Cuba’s brief and troubled practice of democracy: anti
-imperialist in theory but aligned with the United States in the Cold War; social democratic in principle but limited in its ability to deliver either socialism or a satisfactory democracy.17
Although Castro and the anti-Communist Left would eventually find themselves acting as enemies, they had once depended on each other to advance common interests. The exact moment of Castro’s conversion to Communism may forever remain a matter of myth and mystery, but it is clear that Cuba’s anti-Communist Left once considered him an ally and a friend. In 1954 Castro languished in the notorious prison on the Isle of Pines, sixty-two miles off the Cuban mainland. On the previous 26 July, in 1953, he had led an assault on the military barracks at Moncada in an attempt to begin a revolution that would bring down the government of Batista. The attack failed, and many of Castro’s fighters were killed during or after the attempted raid. Castro was arrested, and, given the chance to make his own defense, the young lawyer made a courtroom speech titled “History Will Absolve Me.”
The court did not listen to “History” and sentenced Castro to fifteen years in prison. But he was not idle and was able to smuggle letters out of jail to his sympathizers, who continued to work against Batista from the outside. His supporters had the responsibility of editing and indeed creating “History Will Absolve Me” for publication as a pamphlet—as published, it was a statement longer than he could possibly have delivered in court. It was a lengthy attack on the unconstitutional government of Batista and a defense of Castro’s own actions, intended to circulate throughout the country as useful propaganda. A nationalist text, it lacked, save for one reference to the “capitalist class,” any sign of Marxist influence. Castro called for the restoration of legitimate power via the constitution of 1940 and a program of land reform, profit sharing, the punishment of ill-gotten gains, and solidarity with the democratic peoples of the continent. Its distribution throughout Cuba made Castro more famous than he ever had been as a free man and created new adherents, including liberals and professionals.