Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Urban-rural contrasts were evident in housing, where 93 percent of rural homes had no electricity. Agricultural workers also suffered from underemployment. About one-quarter of Cuba’s total labor force worked only one hundred days each year. And in the 1950s, as the Cuban economy stagnated apart from the tourist sector, their wages dropped even further. Louis Pérez explains, “A [sugar] worker who earned $5 daily in 1951 was earning $4.35 per day in 1955. . . . Workers in transportation, tobacco, henequen (a tropical plant used to manufacture rope and twine), along with other manufacturing sectors, similarly experienced an approximate 20 percent loss of wages during these years.”28

  Batista’s Cuba was in reality two distinct countries. One was distinguished by the high-rolling, vice-ridden lifestyle of North American tourism in Havana, with its circles of Cubans dependent on that dominant industry and US corporations. The other was a country of abject poverty, economic stagnation, and rural underemployment. Batista’s government did little to generate meaningful development for the vast majority, and the resulting dissatisfaction and disgust was spread throughout the country.

  Notes

  1. Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2009), 11.

  2. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 205.

  3. Rebecca C. Park, “Brief History of the US Residence and Eagle, Havana, Cuba,” June 2005 (pamphlet; US Interests Section, Havana, Cuba).

  4. “Cuban Aid Pledged to US if War Comes,” New York Times, May 23, 1940, 4.

  5. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013), 125–41.

  6. Pérez, Cuba, 220–21.

  7. Pérez, Cuba, 223.

  8. “Travel to Cuba Rises,” New York Times, January 3, 1951, 71.

  9. “Unsettled Labor Frustrates Cuba,” New York Times, January 4, 1952, 64.

  10. Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 110.

  11. “Eduardo R. Chibás: Last Speech,” trans. Walter Lippmann from a transcript prepared by Raúl Chibás, July 31, 1982; original Spanish version available at http://www.partidortodoxo.org/Aldabonazo.htm; English translation available at http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs3896.html.

  12. Domínguez, Cuba, 113.

  13. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  14. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 49.

  15. “Batista Says Cuba Cleaned Out Reds,” New York Times, March 11, 1954, 5.

  16. R. Hart Phillips, “Cuba Is Betting on Her New Gambling Casinos,” New York Times, November 6, 1955.

  17. Ann Louis Bardach, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 245. Emphasis in the original.

  18. T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba . . . and Then Lost It to the Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 2007), 95–96, 132–33.

  19. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Inspector General Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” May 23, 1967, 25, 35, 104. Available at National Archives and Records Administration, JFK Record Series; Record Number: 104-10213-10101; File Number: JFK64-48 :F52 1998 .06 .23 .11 :39 :07 :420082.

  20. English, Havana Nocturne, 168, 216. The quotation is taken from 216.

  21. Philip Brenner attended the meeting.

  22. Richard R. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1969), 22.

  23. Luis Bértola and José Antonio Ocampo, The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), table A.2; Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Economic and Social Balance of 50 Years of Cuban Revolution,” in Cuba in Transition: Papers and Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 19 (2009: 377, http://www.ascecuba.org/c/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/v19-mesolago.pdf.

  24. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, 23.

  25. Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 161.

  26. Marvin Leiner, “Two Decades of Educational Change in Cuba,” Journal of Reading 25, no. 3 (December 1981): 202–3; Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, 35.

  27. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 145.

  28. Pérez, Cuba, 235.

  Chapter 7

  The Revolutionary Struggle, 1953–1958

  In terms of struggle, when we talk about the people we’re talking about the 600,000 Cubans without work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a livelihood; the 500,000 farm laborers who live in miserable shacks, who work four months of the year and starve the rest . . . the 400,000 industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are wretched hovels, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender . . . the 100,000 small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs . . . the 30,000 teachers and professors who are so devoted, and so necessary to improve the destiny of future generations and who are so badly treated and paid. . . . To these people whose desperate roads through life have been paved with the bricks of betrayal and false promises, we were not going to say: “We will give you . . . ” but rather: “Here it is, now fight for it with everything you have, so that liberty and happiness may be yours!”

  —Fidel Castro, October 1, 19531

  The Failed Moncada Attack

  Not long after Batista’s 1952 takeover, Fidel Castro began organizing an armed insurgency against the government. An impassioned orator in the mold of Chibás, Fidel had been a radical student leader at the University of Havana. He, too, had begun to speak on a weekly radio program aimed at the Ortodoxo Party’s youth wing. During the last half of 1952 and into 1953, he and his younger brother, Raúl Castro Ruz, trained groups of insurgents and planned an assault that they hoped would spark an island-wide rebellion against the Batista dictatorship. Their target was the Moncada Barracks/Armory in Santiago, the second largest barracks in Cuba’s second largest city. It seemed more vulnerable than the country’s primary military base, Camp Columbia in Havana, and Santiago’s location had symbolic importance. Prior insurrections against tyrannical rulers had always started in Oriente, the easternmost province.

  July 26, 1953. This was the day when Santiago de Cuba celebrated its carnival, coinciding with the end of the sugar harvest. With a logic similar to George Washington’s Christmas Eve attack on Hessian mercenaries during the American Independence War, the Cuban rebels expected to find Batista’s 14,000 troops drunk at Santiago’s Moncada Barracks. Dressed as sergeants in replicas of regular army uniforms, about 160 of them set out for the twelve-mile trek from their hideout in Siboney. A backup group headed for the Bayamo Barracks, ninety miles farther to the west. They arrived at Moncada just before the sounding of reveille at daybreak. Fidel’s group led the charge at the barracks while Raúl’s smaller unit attacked the adjacent Palace of Justice.

  Even years later, Castro insisted that the foolhardy operation was well planned, but the fighters lacked sufficient experience. “If we’d taken Moncada we’d have toppled Batista, without question,” he said. “In Santiago de Cuba, it would have taken them hours to recover from the chaos and confusion that would have been created in their ranks, and that would have given us time for the subsequent steps.”2

  In fact, the rebels were quickly overwhelmed by superior numbers and firepower—and by disorganization. Some of the fighters became lost in Santiago and could not find the Moncada. With eight of his comrades killed and twelve wounded, Fidel ordered a withdrawal. He and Raúl fled with fewer than half the insurgents to the countryside. A few days later, th
ey were captured. Batista ordered that ten prisoners be shot for every soldier killed in the attack (thirteen had died), and the slaughter was halted at seventy only by the intercession of Cardinal Manuel Arteaga y Betancourt, the archbishop of Havana.3 Two months later, Batista put the remaining July 26th Movement survivors on trial.

  “History Will Absolve Me”

  Fidel served as the defense lawyer in the first of two trials of about 100 defendants, some of whom had not even been connected to the attack. His skilled oratory won leniency for a majority of those charged. A month later, he represented himself as a defendant in the second trial. Speaking extemporaneously (he later reconstructed and published, perhaps with some embellishment, his two-hour defense), the rebel leader declared with a nationalist fervor, “We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty. . . . We were taught . . . to sing every afternoon the verses of our national anthem: ‘To live in chains is to live in disgrace and in opprobrium,’ and ‘to die for one’s homeland is to live forever!’” And in conclusion, he told the court, “I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my compañeros [comrades]. Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”4

  The court sentenced Fidel to fifteen years in prison and Raúl to thirteen years. Dispatched to a penitentiary on the Isle of Pines, they were treated as political prisoners, not common criminals, which meant they were able to receive books and even cigars. As biographer Robert Quirk recounts, Fidel saw confinement as an opportunity “to mold his group into an educated and disciplined phalanx of insurrectionists.”5 They requested reading material from friends and relatives, and by the end of the year, their library had over three hundred volumes. Fidel read widely, favoring histories of military battles, masterwork novels of authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, and Cirilo Villaverde, and the classic works of Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx—though he did not dwell on Marxist-Leninist theory.6 (In a 2001 interview with one of the authors, Castro remarked that his “understanding of socialism did not come from books, like it did for academics, but from personal experiences.”)

  But school lasted only twenty months. Six months after Batista’s 1954 landslide “election” victory, he sought to add further legitimacy to his rule by reinstating some civil liberties, such as a guarantee of free expression, and granting amnesty to all political prisoners, including those involved in the Moncada attack. Yet the veneer of democracy did not produce the intended political effect. Student protests intensified in late 1955, and Batista responded with waves of repression against even moderate opponents.7

  By then both Fidel and Raúl had left Cuba for Mexico, having decided that the only viable way to effect political change in Cuba would be through armed revolt. Fifty years later, Fidel recalled to Ignacio Ramonet, “I wasn’t in any imminent danger, but I couldn’t keep agitating in Cuba. . . . In the weeks after we got out of prison, we had engaged in an intense campaign to take our ideas to the people. . . . We had structured our own revolutionary organization—the 26th of July Movement—and we’d shown that it was impossible to carry out the struggle by peaceful, legal means.”8

  By July 1955, when Fidel arrived in Mexico, Raúl already had assembled a contingency of other Cuban exiles. As the group planned for their armed return to Cuba, Raúl introduced Fidel to a twenty-seven-year-old Argentine doctor—Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna—who had fled to Mexico the previous year from Guatemala, where he witnessed the US-sponsored coup against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. Castro remembered that “There was nothing surprising about our immediate sympathy with one another: . . . he’d visited Guatemala, he’d witnessed the American intervention there, and he knew we’d attacked a military stronghold, he knew about our struggle in Cuba, he knew how we thought. I arrived, we talked to each other, and right there he joined us.”9

  The Revolutionary Conflict

  Over the next eighteen months, the Castro brothers and Che organized a new plan of attack with the exiles. They trained first at a farm close to Mexico City and then moved farther away after the Mexican government raided the place. In late November 1956, eighty-two of them squeezed aboard a small cabin cruiser, the Granma, and set off on a 1,200-mile, treacherous voyage to Oriente Province, the birthplace of Cuban uprisings. Facing rough seas, they made slower progress than anticipated and ran aground on December 2, 1956, two days after their planned arrival, which was intended to coincide with a multipronged set of disruptions in Santiago led by Frank País.

  País was a prominent figure among a number of young militants who had been creating an underground network throughout the country—mainly in urban areas—aimed at overthrowing the Batista dictatorship. These included Armando Hart, Faustino Pérez, and Haydee Santamaría in Havana, and Celia Sánchez and Vilma Espín in Santiago.

  Within days of the landing, the Cuban military discovered and attacked the Granma rebels. Only eighteen—including Fidel, Raúl, and Che—evaded detection by lying under leaves and straw in a sugar cane field. Bone weary and exhausted, they seemed to face certain annihilation as a search plane circled overhead, looking for any signs of movement. “There was never any situation more dramatic,” Fidel exclaimed in his autobiography. “When I realized there was no way I could stay awake, that I was sure to fall asleep, I lay down on my side and put the rifle butt between my legs and the end of the barrel under my chin. I didn’t want to be captured alive if the enemy should come upon me while I was asleep.”10

  But protected and sustained by sympathetic campesinos, the survivors managed to retreat and regroup in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Castro said that at one point, they had only seven rifles among them as they sought to rebuild an insurgency once more. Slowly, they made contact with their urban allies, students, and other government opponents. “We are in no hurry,” Fidel wrote to País in 1957. “We’ll keep fighting as long as is necessary.”11

  As they developed support lines, Fidel chose targets of opportunity whose impact would be more psychological than tactical. The July 26th fighters began attacking lightly defended outposts of the government’s rural guard that the local citizenry despised. In January 1957, the rebels ambushed a rural guard column at La Plata, seizing weapons, and in May, successfully attacked another column at El Uvero.12

  The most powerful impact came from an interview with Fidel Castro, which appeared in the New York Times on February 24, 1957. Until that point, there was still uncertainty about whether the military had killed the young firebrand. Journalist Herbert Matthews answered the question dramatically in his lead sentence, “Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth, is alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastnesses of the Sierra Maestra, at the southern tip of the island.”13

  Havana members of the July 26th Movement had arranged for the Times’ correspondent to make a dangerous and arduous trek to the guerrillas’ mountain hideaway. Cleverly, Fidel ordered the small group of fighters there to march continuously around the encampment, changing their clothes, to make it appear that their numbers were far greater than the reality.14 Matthews reported, “President Fulgencio Batista has the cream of his Army around the area, but the Army men are fighting a thus-far losing battle to destroy the most dangerous enemy General Batista has yet faced in a long and adventurous career as a Cuban leader and dictator.”

  The journalist then described Fidel Castro in terms that made him inescapably appealing to a US audience:

  The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership. . . . He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections. . . . The 26th of July Movement talks of nationalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imp
erialism. I asked Señor Castro about that. He answered, “You can be sure we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people.”15

  Historian Hugh Thomas has argued that “the significance of the interview was considerable” for the revolutionary struggle. “Matthews created for North Americans the legend of Castro, the hero of the mountains.” The story also demoralized the military, he explained, and as word spread throughout Cuba that Castro was alive, it propelled more people to join the movement.16

  Batista Imposes a Reign of Terror

  Tactics Resemble Weyler’s Butchery

  In response, Batista ordered his forces to pursue the July 26th Movement vigorously. The army carried out sweeps of the countryside, terrorizing people who might provide logistical support to the rebels. It designated key military zones where peasants and farmers were forced from their homes and taken to relocation camps. The government warned that it would presume stragglers in the militarized zones were guerrilla supporters and thus would be subject to arrest—or worse.17