Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Meanwhile, the economic turmoil caused many Cubans to lose their jobs, and those who still had employment faced rising prices on food and most goods. The loss of revenue brought even more unemployment as government shortfalls forced cuts in patronage jobs. As a result, trade unions gained strength and worker militancy increased in the early 1920s.24

  In 1922, students at the University of Havana began to engage in political action. Taking inspiration from students at Argentina’s University of Córdoba, they demanded autonomy for the university, the removal of corrupt professors, and an end to US intervention. After students took over the university forcibly in 1923, Zayas gave in to most of their demands, and the government gave official recognition to the Federation of University Students (FEU is the Spanish acronym). Julio Antonio Mella, head of the FEU, became a founder of the Cuban Communist Party in 1925. At the same time, calls for suffrage from a nascent women’s movement grew more fervent and crystallized in the first meeting of the National Congress of Women in 1923.25

  Although Zayas had inherited the economic recession and the rampant government corruption, Cubans blamed him for the continuation of hard times. In the 1924 general elections, they turned to Gerardo Machado y Morales, a man of few political accomplishments though a wily self-promoter. He had been a minor general in the Cuban War for Independence, mayor of Santa Clara, and a government minister. But in the preceding quarter century, he also had found ways to become wealthy, owning two newspapers, a bank, a sugar mill, and a construction company. These credentials assuaged concerns US officials might have had about his campaign “platform of regeneration.”

  Enter the “Tropical Mussolini”

  Machado pledged to restore the economy, to build schools and roads, to expand social services, and to replace patronage with a modern civil service. In fact, he did attempt to promote new industries and to diversify agricultural production, and he enacted a tariff law that provided protection that domestic businesses had sought. He also initiated major construction projects that reduced unemployment in between sugar harvests—including a new building in Havana for the seat of government that replicates Paris’s Pantheon and bears a resemblance to the US Capitol. Yet the overall economy still depended on sugar, a weak pillar on which to base recovery and growth. Although Cuba attracted an increasing number of Prohibition-era US tourists who could satisfy their thirst with the island’s rum, the low price for sugar brought a depression to Cuba even before the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash.26

  Cuban presidents, like those throughout Latin America at the time, were limited to one term in office. But Machado had dictatorial ambitions and initially sought to extend his term of office by two years without a new election. The Cuban Congress wavered in deciding among several constitutional proposals to change the presidential term, and finally approved a new process that would create a single six-year term for the president and allow Machado to run for the office in 1928.

  Given the state of the economy, Machado sought to avoid a meaningful campaign. Under the banner of cooperativismo, the “tropical Mussolini”—as student leader Mella called him—relied on ties he created between business and government to maneuver the Liberal and Republican parties to nominate him so that he could be elected by acclamation. At the same time, he gained support from US investors by pushing a law through the Cuban Congress that allowed the foreign entities dominating Cuba’s electricity and transportation companies to seize land and property from both the Cuban state and private citizens for the purpose of expanding services.27

  But then calamity struck. The US economic depression hit Cuba especially hard. Consider that from 1929 to 1932 annual sugar earnings declined from $200 million to $40 million. When demonstrations escalated and turned violent in 1930, Machado responded with waves of attacks on the protesters. Meanwhile, behind the demonstrators, a new generation of leaders organized the University Student Directory (DEU is the Spanish acronym) and plotted to oust Machado along with what they viewed as his illegitimate government.

  Original members of the DEU—later nicknamed the “Generation of 1930”—included Carlos Prío Socarrás (Cuban president from 1948 to 1952), Raúl Roa Kouri (foreign minister from 1959 to 1976), and Eduardo Chíbas (founder of the Ortodoxo Party and a mentor to Fidel Castro). As a physiology professor at the University of Havana, Ramón Grau San Martín (Cuban president from 1944 to 1948) was not eligible to join the DEU but served as an adviser.28

  The 1933 Revolution

  “Good Neighbor” Intervention

  Cuba’s political turmoil was occurring just as US policy toward Latin America was changing. Shortly after his election in 1928, President-elect Herbert Hoover began a two-month tour of the region. Aimed at recasting the unfavorable image that the United States had acquired during the prior thirty years of intervention, he frequently used the term “good neighbor.”29

  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked up the theme in his first inaugural address, pledging to “dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”30 The new US policy gave hope to Machado’s opponents that Roosevelt was sincere and would not invoke the Platt Amendment to intervene.

  But US investors, who watched Cuba’s economic collapse and dysfunctional government wreak havoc on their profits, pressured the new American leader through their high-level access. Two members of Roosevelt’s informal group of academic advisers, the “Brain Trust,” had been president and vice president of the American Molasses Company, which had holdings in Cuba. A third member was on the company’s board of directors. Three of the president’s cabinet nominees also had various connections to companies with economic interests in Cuba.31

  Machado’s brutality provided an additional impetus for intervention. Roosevelt confidant Sumner Welles reported that it involved daily occurrences of “governmental murder and clandestine assassination.”32 Yet Roosevelt was determined not to send in troops. With a regionwide meeting scheduled for late 1933, Roosevelt wanted to avoid a repeat of the criticism Latin Americans had heaped on the United States at a 1928 conference. Instead he sent Welles as ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Cuba. Arriving in May 1933, the new envoy sought to calm the waters by offering Machado some “friendly advice”—restore constitutional rule and resign as president.33 Machado refused to budge.

  Welles persisted with his efforts at “mediation,” encouraging the established moderate opposition and some minor groups to challenge Machado. The dictator responded by ending press censorship and pushing a general amnesty law through the Cuban Congress. But he refused to resign and widespread protests continued. In July 1933, after police bloodied striking Havana bus drivers, sympathy strikes began to erupt. The next month these escalated into a paralyzing general strike. Welles’s patience had run out. He threatened that the United States would cease to recognize the legitimacy of the Cuban government and demanded Machado step down.34 As a replacement Welles proposed Cuba’s recently resigned ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada, a man well known in Washington as a reliable ally of US business interests.35 An apolitical diplomat and son of the 1868 revolutionary Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Welles’s choice was innocuous enough to be palatable to all sides.36

  With the United States having discarded the pretense of being a neutral mediator, army generals opted to abandon Machado, ousting him in a coup d’etat on August 12. Welles then maneuvered behind the scenes for the military to name Céspedes as secretary of state and then for the Cuban Congress to amend the constitution, making the secretary of state the interim president in case of a vacancy. Céspedes was sworn in as Cuba’s new leader on August 13.

  The US press hailed him as Cuba’s savior and praised Welles for his skillful diplomacy. But Céspedes had l
ittle legitimacy inside Cuba. Unaffiliated with a party, he had no political base. He also retained Machado’s discredited 1928 constituent assembly and he offered no program for meaningful change. Within a month, a group of unlikely revolutionaries had deposed him from the presidency.

  The One-Hundred-Day Government

  Late on September 3, sergeants, corporals, and enlistees stationed at Camp Columbia, a base outside Havana, met to finalize a list of grievances against their senior officers—better pay, increased opportunities for promotion, and better living conditions. When the officers in charge dismissed the demands out of hand, members of this “Sergeants’ Revolt” grew even angrier. Seizing control of the camp, they arrested their former superiors and by the end of September 4 controlled all of Havana’s military garrisons. Their insurrection quickly spread to all the bases throughout the island.

  As news of the mutiny leaked out early on September 4, DEU leaders rushed to Camp Columbia, imploring the mutineers to expand their narrow demands into a revolt against the Céspedes government. Faced with the likelihood of severe punishments by the government if they allowed it to stay in power, the soldiers joined forces with the civilians to topple Céspedes, who closed down the provisional government on September 5. Five days later, the coalition established a ruling junta and named Grau San Martín president of the provisional revolutionary government. It was now backed by the military under the direction of Fulgencio Batista, one of the Sergeants’ Revolt leaders.37

  The revolutionary government drew up a new constitution that included many of the political reforms the DEU had advocated in its “Manifesto-Program to the Cuban People.”38 It also enacted land reforms that limited the size of the farm a family could own, labor reforms that included an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage, and a law that required at least 50 percent of the workers of any company to be Cuban.

  Implementing such far-reaching plans was easier said than done. The Grau government lacked internal cohesion because the single cause that united the DEU and the military had been their opposition to Machado. Meanwhile, Washington refused to recognize the government and sent warships off the Cuban coast, stopping just short of intervention. When Roosevelt denied Welles’s request for troops, the ambassador began a relentless campaign of subversion. Reinforced by US nonrecognition of the government, he pressured moderates to refuse negotiations with Grau, encouraged former senior military officers to boycott the army, and wooed Batista away from the coalition. Vice President Antonio Guiteras, an ardent anti-imperialist, derided the deserters as “servants” of the United States.39

  In one of its final acts of defiance, the government nationalized the Cuban Electric Company, which was owned by General Electric through several subsidiaries such as American and Foreign Power, and two mills owned by the Cuban American Sugar Corporation.40 Then, on January 15, 1934, Grau and the members of his 100-day regime resigned. Batista chose Colonel Carlos Mendieta to be the new president. But the wily sergeant was the principal player the Roosevelt administration trusted and through whom it reasserted US direction over Cuban politics during the next six years. Notably, Roosevelt was not the only North American who found Batista to be a useful ally. In 1933, the former sergeant held his first meeting with Meyer Lansky, the American mobster who viewed Cuba as a future home for his growing nefarious enterprises.

  As a gesture of good neighborliness, Roosevelt then abrogated the hated Platt Amendment. But his administration negotiated a new agreement for the 45-square-mile Guantánamo naval base. Under the original accord, the United States could lease the base for 99 years. The 1934 pact provided for a lease that could be held in perpetuity, or until both sides agreed to end it.41 Each year, the United States sends Cuba a check of about $4,000 in payment on the lease. The Cuban government cashed the first check in 1959, but since then it has refused to do so, not wanting to legitimate US occupation of the territory. The funds are held in an escrow account at a New York bank.

  Notes

  1. Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of US Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 145.

  2. Le Riverend, Economic History of Cuba, 206.

  3. Pérez, Cuba, 156–59; Benjamin, The United States and Cuba, 9–10.

  4. Pérez, Cuba, 145–46.

  5. Pérez, Cuba, 149.

  6. Orville H. Platt, “The Pacification of Cuba,” Independent, June 27, 1901.

  7. Office of the Historian, US State Department, “MILESTONES: 1899–1913: The United States, Cuba, and the Platt Amendment, 1901,” accessed December 30, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/platt. On May 9, 2017, the State Department “retired” this account and now makes no reference to the Platt Amendment except to say that the United States abrogated the terms of the amendment in 1934 under the Good Neighbor policy. Accessed May 22, 2017, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/good-neighbor.

  8. Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898–1958 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 17.

  9. José Martí, “The Monetary Conference of the American Republics (1891),” in José Martí: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002), 307.

  10. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7, 157.

  11. Gott, Cuba, 92, 94.

  12. Gott, Cuba, 114.

  13. Stephen Irving Max Schwab, Guantánamo, USA: The Untold History of America’s Cuban Outpost (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009), 94.

  14. Gott, Cuba, 115

  15. Juan C. Santamarina, “The Cuba Company and the Expansion of American Business in Cuba, 1898–1915,” Business History Review 74 (Spring 2000): 41–42.

  16. Santamarina, “The Cuba Company,” 42.

  17. The account here of Ángel Castro’s return to Cuba is the one most commonly reported, though there are biographies with conflicting details. Hugh Thomas (Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom [New York: Harper & Row, 1971], 803–4) and Robert E. Quirk (Fidel Castro [New York: Norton, 1993], 9) assert that Fidel’s father did not return to Spain after the 1898 war.

  18. Fidel Castro’s official birthdate was August 13, 1926. However, according to journalist Claudia Furiati, he was born in 1927. She asserts that his father changed Fidel’s birth certificate making him seem one year older so that he could enroll in el Colégio Belén. Claudia Furiati, Fidel Castro: Uma biografia consentida, 3a Edição (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Revan, 2001), 53–54.

  19. Gott, Cuba, 115.

  20. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 7, 157.

  21. “Tobacco Trust in Cuba,” New York Times, May 29, 1902.

  22. Pérez, Cuba, 176–77.

  23. “President Sends Crowder to Cuba to Study Crisis,” New York Times, January 4, 1921, 1.

  24. Le Riverend, Economic History of Cuba, 232–33.

  25. Oscar Zanetti Leucuna, Historia Mínima de Cuba (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), chapter 7.

  26. Luis E. Aguilar, Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution (New York: Norton, 1972), chapter 5.

  27. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 64.

  28. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, chapter 9; Gott, Cuba, 133–34.

  29. Schoultz, Beneath the United States, 290.

  30. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, accessed June 8, 2014, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp.

  31. Robert F. Smith, The United States and Cuba: Business and Diplomacy, 1917–1960 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1961), 142–43.

  32. As quoted in Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 129.

  33. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 131.

  34. Smith, The United States and Cuba, 146–47.

  35. J. D. Phillips, “Machado ‘Leave’ Sought by Welles as Cuban Solution: Ambassador Suggests Naming a New State Secretary Who Would Succeed President. Executive Bars Quitting . .
. Toll of Rioting Now 30,” New York Times, August 9, 1933, 1.

  36. “Céspedes Served Country as Envoy,” New York Times, August 13, 1933, 23. Céspedes also served twice as Cuba’s ambassador to the United States and France and secretary of state during the first year of Machado’s presidency.

  37. Pérez, Cuba, 208; Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 159–62.

  38. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 157–59.

  39. Antonio Guiteras, “Septembrismo,” reprinted in La Jiribilla: Revista Digital de Cultura Cubana, no. 290, 25 de noviembre al primero de diciembre, 2006 (translation by the authors), accessed June 29, 2014, http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2006/n290_11/290_07.html.

  40. José A. Gómez-Ibáñez, Regulating Infrastructure: Monopoly, Contracts, and Discretion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 123–24.

  41. Schwab, Guantánamo, USA, 134–36.

  Chapter 6

  Playground of the Western World and the Rise of Batista, 1934–1958

  Dirt shacks, no running water—the way those people lived, it’s just how life was to me. I was a child. Mother didn’t like it, but Daddy reminded her that the company paid them higher wages than any Cuban-owned sugar operation. Mother thought it was just terrible the way the Cuban plantations did business. It broke her heart, the idea of a race of people exploiting their own kind. The cane cutters were all Jamaicans, of course—not a single one of them was Cuban—but I knew what she meant: native people taking advantage of other native people, brown against black, that kind of thing. She was proud of Daddy; proud of the fact that the United Fruit Company upheld a certain standard, paid better wages than they had to, just to be decent. She said she hoped it would influence the Cubans to treat their own kind a bit better.

  —Rachel Kushner1

  The 1940 Republic

  Batista Wins 1940 Election

  Along with a new constitution that had been hammered out in about four months and completed by a constituent assembly in June, the 1940 election gave Colonel Fulgencio Batista’s presidency a patina of democratic legitimacy. Batista had resigned from the military to campaign in the election. Conveniently, the constituent assembly exempted him from a provision that required a candidate to have been out of the military for at least one year prior to assuming the presidency.