The revolutionary government’s partial solution was food rationing. To be sure, other countries have relied on various types of rationing. During World War II, US consumers could buy only limited amounts of items such as sugar, butter, and gasoline, because of the need to divert supplies to the war effort. Starting in 1962, Cuba used rationing to provide everyone with enough food for a basic diet. The ration book, called a libreta, covered a large number of items and was distributed to every household.19 But a family’s libreta was usable only at a designated store, and many times stores did not have the food supposedly “guaranteed” by the program.
Shortages were acceptable, though, because they affected everyone, not only the poor. Cuban officials demonstrably suffered too. Fidel, Raúl, and Che were vigilant about avoiding the kind of corruption that delegitimated reform and revolutionary governments elsewhere. Ultimately the system of food rationing functioned well enough so that malnutrition disappeared in Cuba until the 1990s.
Adding Order to Revolutionary Fervor
Intent on bringing about change quickly, the revolutionary leaders made decisions on the fly, continually experimenting as they simultaneously tried to solve immediate problems and fashion a coherent plan for the country’s development. In one case, the government hastily constructed a housing complex at the edge of Havana for squatters from the countryside. The new residents brought their farm animals with them—chickens, pigs, and even cows—and within a year the complex became uninhabitable. Problems arose as turf battles between ministries created duplication, waste, and inefficiency.20 The leadership soon recognized that slogans, good intentions, and trenchant critiques were not enough to transform the economy. They needed new organizations to move the Revolution forward, and a set of rules to coordinate the work of the new structures. The process of rationalization, adding order to revolutionary fervor, began with the creation of several new ministries, each empowered to control a critical aspect of the economy.
New Ministries
INRA, the agrarian reform institute, was foremost among the new ministries, and it spawned several others: the Ministry of Industries (headed by Che Guevara), the Ministry of Fishing, and the Ministry of Mining.21 By the end of 1960, two-thirds of the economy was state controlled and the Central Planning Board (JUCEPLAN) became the coordinating body for the whole economy. It was backed up by the Ministry of Internal Trade, which was responsible for wholesale and retail distribution, and the Ministry of Foreign Trade, which controlled international commerce.
Carlos Rafael Rodríguez replaced Nuñez Jiménez in 1962 as INRA’s chief. Rodríguez was one of the few who did have governmental experience and a background in planning. A member of the PSP, the old Cuban Communist Party, he had been a minister in Batista’s unity government during World War II. Older than Raúl and Fidel, Rodríguez gained their trust in part because of his strategic acumen, and in part because he had defied Moscow in supporting the July 26th Movement.
In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union pursued a policy of promoting “peaceful coexistence” with the United States. To Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier and Communist Party general secretary, this meant that the Soviet Union would not interfere with US interests in the Western Hemisphere and the United States would not meddle in Eastern European affairs. In line with this policy, Moscow ordered Communist parties in Latin America neither to support nor engage in armed struggle and violent revolution. The order was especially relevant to Cuba’s PSP, which watched as the Revolution unfolded under their noses.
Moscow did not vilify Rodríguez for his insubordination and relied on him as a link to the revolutionary government. Still, Rodríguez played a quiet role at first, mainly as an adviser to Raúl Castro. The revolutionaries sought to obscure any ties to Communists, in part to avoid arousing US concerns that Cuba would become a Soviet outpost. Rodríguez was well known as a theoretically sophisticated Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist.
However, by March 1960 former PSP officials were openly serving in government posts and Havana had established diplomatic relations with Moscow. Castro began to include Rodríguez in the small group that determined government policy, and so his appointment to head INRA was not a surprise. In 1976, he was elevated to the post of second vice president after Raúl Castro.
New Political Organizations
Fidel and those close to him believed the Revolution could succeed only if Cubans discarded a subservient mentality the Spanish had fostered during the colonial period and the United States reinforced from 1898 to 1958.22 They wanted Cubans to embrace the Revolution as their own achievement. In this light, Castro’s initial weeklong trek—from Santiago to Havana starting on January 2, 1959—had both cultural and political importance. “The salt of the earth, the guajiros, were bringing political freedom to the metropolis,” sociologist Valdés explains. “The guerrilleros repeated their message at each stop: the revolutionary cause had triumphed; it was not the victory for a particular organization but a ‘people’s victory.’”23
The revolutionaries placed a great emphasis on full participation, because they believed that Cubans would develop a selfless, communitarian consciousness by actively behaving that way, not merely by reciting slogans.24 The institutions they created for engagement were mass organizations. These were intended to link one or more significant aspects of a Cuban’s daily life to the larger society. While the mass organizations were outside the governing political party, they functioned to engender loyalty and adhesion to the system.25 They also served as a means to protect the Revolution, monitoring potential threats festering below the surface.
By the mid-1960s there were five mass organizations: Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC in the Spanish acronym), National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), and the Federation of University Students (FEU). While each organization featured voting for local representatives, they were not intended to be involved with elections for political offices. Also, in contrast to the US model of interest-group democracy—in which theoretically individuals express and promote their interests through groups such as labor unions or trade associations that then pressure the government—the Cuban model assumed that seemingly disparate interests could be made compatible once class differences were demolished. For example, where the CTC once fought for workers’ interests vis-à-vis managers of private companies, the revolutionary model assumed that the old CTC role would no longer be necessary. The state had become the new management and would supposedly serve, not exploit, workers. The new role for the CTC would be to stimulate workers to be more productive, with the benefits of increased output shared universally.26
CDRs were created in September 1960 as a response to increased attacks by counterrevolutionaries. Organized on nearly every city block, these neighborhood watch committees became an expanded form of the people’s militias formed in 1959. Their symbol was a large eye and a stylized figure raising a sword over the Cuban flag. In part, they also functioned as a means of socialization, engaging everyone in the process of providing security. By the end of the 1960s—after the government had successfully routed organized counterrevolutionary activity and the United States had ended most of its support for anti-Castro terrorists—CDRs took on a different role as a civic organization and an adjunct to social service agencies (see figures 10.5 and 10.6 for the logo and propaganda of a CDR).
Figure 10.5. Contemporary CDR logo
Polyclinics relied on CDRs to monitor and assist released patients with their recovery. They helped to reintegrate ex-convicts into society, foster school attendance by checking on absentees, and enlist volunteers for public events and campaigns.27 As a center of civic life, CDRs organized local sports activities and block parties.
Figure 10.6. Bulletin board outside a CDR in 1974. Photo by Philip Brenner.
In December 1974, one of the authors, Philip Brenner, participa
ted in voluntary work that a CDR had organized on a Sunday morning in Varadero, in preparation for a New Year’s Eve fiesta. The “workers” consisted of Brenner, who swept fallen leaves from the street, and two children, aged nine and eleven, who climbed telephone poles in order to hang streamers. Most of the neighbors were out on the street, mainly gossiping and occasionally offering advice to the three workers. No one seemed to fear being labeled counterrevolutionary for their lack of effort.
University students had long been organized through a national grassroots organization, the FEU, which had produced several national leaders prior to the Revolution and had wielded some political influence. Wary of its potential influence, the new government tried to shape the FEU’s agenda. While it successfully co-opted the leadership, discontent bubbled up among the members when the government imposed constraints on universities, in terms of curriculum and students’ freedom of expression. Late in 1967, the government forced the FEU to disband, claiming that it duplicated efforts because the youth movement of the Cuban Communist Party, the Young Communists (UJC), had the same members as the FEU. In reality, only the FEU leadership overlapped with the UJC. When the FEU was reconstituted in 1971, its first proclamation avowed loyalty to the Revolution.28
Communists (PSP)
Until mid-1961, there was no organization or party that coordinated the several mass organizations and linked them to the purposes of the government. At that point, Fidel created a new entity to serve this purpose, the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI). It was made up of members from the July 26th Movement, the Revolutionary Directorate, and the PSP. Fidel reluctantly brought PSP members into the process of rationalizing the Revolution, because he believed there was a need to include a cadre of disciplined people who could teach others about socialist principles. Aníbal Escalante, former editor of the PSP newspaper, Hoy, and a slavish follower of Moscow’s dictums, became the ORI’s organizational secretary. This proved to be a source of disruption, as Escalante used his position to place former PSP buddies in key ORI posts, providing himself with a base from which he could control the ORI.
Fidel cut Escalante’s plans short in March 1962, denouncing him for “sectarianism,” charging that he was “blinded by personal ambition,” and exiling him to Czechoslovakia.29 He also purged several other former PSP members from the ORI leadership, and replaced Escalante with Emilio Aragonés, who was national coordinator of the July 26th Movement. Notably, the move came at an especially sensitive moment in Cuban-Soviet relations, when Cuba was looking for military support in what it anticipated would be a new US invasion. In removing those who advocated that Cuba should adhere closely to advice from Moscow, Castro made clear that even under these dire circumstances, he would not allow the Soviets to dictate Cuba’s internal affairs.
The Cuban leader contrasted his vision of the party he was proposing to what were unmistakable references about the Soviet Communist Party. The Cuban party, he declared, would have an integral link with the masses; it would not stand above them, dominating, dispensing favors as a means of control. The new ORI leaders reorganized the party at the end of 1962 and gave the new entity the name that Fidel wanted: the United Party of the Socialist Revolution (PURS). The PURS lasted until 1965, when the reestablished Cuban Communist Party (PCC) replaced it.
Thus, a communist party did not exist in Cuba in 1959. Cuba did not even renew diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union until the following year. US hostility toward the revolutionary regime during its first year emanated less from a concern about communism than about the loss of US domination over Latin America and control over a country with which the United States believed it had “ties of singular intimacy.”
Notes
1. “Letter from the Secretary of State to the Vice President,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, volume V, American Republics, Document 42, Washington, DC, March 6, 1958, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v05/d42.
2. Milton S. Eisenhower, “United States–Latin American Relations, 1953–1958: Report to the President,” December 27, 1958; reprinted in Department of State Bulletin 40, no. 1021 (January 19, 1959): 90.
3. Claes Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba: The Challenge of Economic Growth with Equity (Boulder, CO : Westview, 1984), 5.
4. Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba, 12–13.
5. Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba, 43.
6. John F. Kennedy, “Address on the First Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress,” March 13, 1962; American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9100.
7. The limit was 30 caballerías, or 995 acres. Farms used for range land, or that were fifty percent more productive than the national average, could be as large as 100 caballerías, or 3,316 acres.
8. Domínguez, Cuba, 438.
9. Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con Fidel—1959, 148. Also see Minor Sinclair and Martha Thompson, Cuba, Going Against the Grain: Agricultural Crisis and Transformation (Boston: Oxfam, 2001), 13.
10. Susan Eva Eckstein, Back from the Future: Cuba Under Castro, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2003), 18.
11. Silvia Pedraza, Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 122, 268.
12. Abel Prieto, “Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign,” Journal of Reading 25, no. 3 (December 1981): 216. Also see Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, chapter 3.
13. Jonathan Kozol, Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), 5.
14. Catherine Murphy’s film about the literacy campaign, Maestra, captures the feelings that four brigadistas express fifty years later. Available at http://www.maestrathefilm.org.
15. Prieto, “Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign,” 218.
16. Julie M. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Conner Gorry and C. William Keck, “The Cuban Health System: In Search of Quality, Efficiency, and Sustainability,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
17. Marguerite Rose Jiménez, “Polio and the Politics of Policy Diffusion in Latin America,” PhD diss. (American University, Washington, DC, 2013), 424.
18. Felipe Eduardo Sixto, “An Evaluation of Four Decades of Cuban Healthcare,” in Cuba in Transition, vol. 12 (McLean, VA: Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, 2002), 326.
19. Media Benjamin, Joseph Collins, and Michael Scott, No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1984), chapter 3.
20. Domínguez, Cuba, 233–35.
21. Edward Boorstein, The Economic Transformation of Cuba (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), chapter 3.
22. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
23. Valdés, “The Revolutionary and Political Content of Fidel Castro’s Charismatic Authority,” 33.
24. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, 7.
25. William LeoGrande, “Mass Political Participation,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988).
26. Maurice Zeitlin, Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
27. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, chapter 4 (especially 80–96).
28. Domínguez, Cuba, 279–80.
29. “Fidel Castro Denounces Sectarianism” (Speech of March 26, 1962), Ministry of Foreign Relations, Republic of Cuba, Political Documents: 2, 12, 17, 23–25; available at http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/compoundobject/collection/radical/id/40999/show/40921.
Chapter 11
Bay o
f Pigs/Playa Girón1
[José Ramón] Suco, the head of the squad from Battalion 339 that had been guarding the radio at Larga Beach, recalled: “One of the literacy teachers had his head on my shoulder, when a mercenary [Bay of Pigs invader] walked up to him and asked, ‘What kind of uniform is that?’ ‘A literacy teacher’s uniform.’ ‘Are you a Communist?’ ‘I support Fidel,’ the boy, who wasn’t even fifteen yet, answered. And the mercenary replied, ‘You know that everyone who supports Fidel is a Communist.’ ‘Well, then, I’m a Communist.’
“If Castro’s planes had been destroyed, if the U.S. Government hadn’t left the exiles to their fate, if they had had greater participation in the planning, if the attack had been made at Trinidad, if the underground had been alerted, if a diversionary landing had been made at Baracoa, if air cover had been provided, if the Brigade had been better equipped, if there had been direct intervention. . . . The exiles thought that, if any of those things had happened, it would have ensured their success. They refused to accept the real reason for their defeat . . . the Cuban people were at the peak of their patriotism and revolutionary fervor, and their support for the Revolution.”
—Juan Carlos Rodríguez2
Cuba Becomes a Threat
US Response to Revolution
At first, Washington did not know what to make of the Cuban Revolution. US officials were well aware of Batista’s atrocities, and formally had suspended new military aid to Cuba in 1958. But the Eisenhower administration did not want to signal its support for armed conflict against established governments, and so at first it took a “wait and see” approach.
On January 7, 1959, the United States gave diplomatic recognition to the new government. One week later, the State Department replaced the US ambassador, Earl E. T. Smith. He had been a Batista booster and large benefactor of the Republican Party, which landed him the appointment to what seemed at the time like a posh, nonproblematic post. The new envoy, Philip Bonsal, was a Spanish-speaking career diplomat known for his sympathy to reformers in Colombia and Bolivia. Concerned about the US reputation for intervention in Latin America, he hoped to find a way that the United States could live with the new regime.3
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence Page 17