Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Despite death threats from paramilitary organizations in Miami, and the assassination of one of the group’s members, the committee traveled to Havana in November 1978 to escort the first of 3,600 released political prisoners to the United States, and to bring back the news that Cuban-Americans would be allowed to visit their homeland. The first horde of visitors arrived in Cuba in time for Christmas. By the end of 1979, more than 100,000 Cuban-Americans had traveled to the island, spending more than $100 million.10 On some days, as many as six charter flights arrived at José Martí Airport from Miami.

  Philip Brenner was leading a group of twenty Americans on an educational tour of the island in February 1980 when he came upon a Cuban electrician at a hotel bar in Camagüey—a city in the middle of the island. José, as we will call him, was in Camagüey as part of a crew from Havana to repair electrical power lines. He and Brenner began to chat in Spanish, but José asserted that he preferred to practice his English. “Oh?” Brenner responded skeptically. “Yes,” he said. “I like to talk to Americans.” As they started on a third beer, José asked almost rhetorically, “Perhaps you know my brother. He has the best pizza restaurant in Miami.” “No,” Brenner replied, “I don’t know your brother or the pizzeria. But perhaps I could take a photo of you and send it to your brother when I return to the States, so that he can see how you are doing?” “No need for that,” José chuckled. “He was here last month, and my sister is coming next month.”

  The best pizza restaurant in Miami! That was quite a claim, and no doubt José was shocked to see the reality when he arrived in Miami, after the journey we confidently assume he took from Mariel a few months later. How was he to know that his siblings, like many of those who visited in 1979, exaggerated their success in the United States? While Cubans who migrated before 1980 tended to be wealthier than other immigrants from Latin America, the differences were not large.11 Yet it was understandable that the émigrés sought to justify their decision to leave by suggesting that the Miami streets were paved with gold. Exile is rarely an easy choice and invariably leaves an emotional scar.

  Cuban authorities did not anticipate the huge quantity of material goods the visitors would bring—cargo loads of small stoves and refrigerators, air conditioners, and other appliances that were difficult to obtain in Cuba. Within months, though, they restricted what visiting exiles could bring into the country, and at the same time permitted them to purchase overpriced Soviet-bloc appliances for their families. The goods were sold at the former Sears department store in Old Havana, which had been shuttered for twenty years, and only Cuban-Americans were permitted to buy them.

  Until then, a Cuban earned the right to purchase durable goods by being an exemplary worker. Refrigerators and the like were apportioned to work centers, which in turn allocated them to the best workers, though political factors also were taken into account. All of a sudden, the system for obtaining scarce goods changed. All that one needed was a visiting relative who would buy it for you, or a friend who had a visiting relative. Cuban-Americans often bought three or four refrigerators for their families, who sold the excess on the black market. This change began to unravel the former incentive system controlled by the state, which relied on bonuses such as refrigerators to reward meritorious work, and it contributed to a further decline in productivity.

  Darker-skinned Cubans, though, did not share equally in the new largesse. Their families disproportionately had stayed in Cuba during the previous twenty years because they tended to benefit from the Revolution. And so there were fewer black relatives bearing gifts from Miami in 1979. The resulting distribution of luxuries along racial lines added to a growing sense of unfairness that some Afro-Cubans perceived. They had borne a greater cost in the African conflicts, sacrificing for the Revolution, and were rewarded with the short end of the bargain.

  The Exodus

  For months, there had been small incidents at several foreign missions in Havana. People seeking to leave Cuba were illegally entering embassy grounds in search of asylum. The growing discontent was combustible and needed only a spark for it to explode. On April 1, 1980, a Cuban policeman was killed trying to stop six Cubans from crashing through the gate at the Peruvian embassy. Cuba asserted the six had no justifiable claim for diplomatic protection and demanded they be tried for the policeman’s murder. When Peru refused, Castro withdrew guards from the embassy. In less than three days, 10,800 people crowded onto the Peruvian embassy grounds seeking asylum.12

  A few months earlier, the Cuban leader had denounced the warm receptions given to boat hijackers who arrived in Miami as tantamount to an endorsement of such behavior. On April 21, he announced that Cubans would be free to emigrate if they were picked up at Mariel harbor—about twenty miles west of Havana—by boats arriving from Florida. A front-page editorial in Granma declared, “We have ended our protection of the peninsula of Florida . . . now they will begin to harvest the fruit of their policy of encouraging illegal departures from Cuba, including the hijacking of boats.”13 The next day, a flotilla of small boats from Florida lined up outside the port.14

  Anti-Castro exiles charged that Castro added to the wave of émigrés by emptying his jails and psychiatric hospitals. In reality, the United States determined in 1984 that only 2,746 out of the more than 125,000 who left Cuba in the Mariel exodus were excludable from the United States for reasons of criminal behavior or mental incapacity.15

  Still, the marielitos were different than previous waves of Cuban immigrants. They included more dark-skinned and younger Cubans. Nearly half had held semiskilled or unskilled jobs, whereas only 8 percent of the 1959–1962 cohort were semiskilled or unskilled workers.16 They had experienced advancements the Revolution had produced: improved health care for everyone and the eradication of epidemic diseases; the end of illiteracy and universal access to a quality education. They had watched Cuba’s global stature soar, and they had begun to acquire a new pride in what it meant to be Cuban. Yet they were no longer willing to sacrifice for a future that seemed to recede farther away, no longer able to suspend belief that life was not better in the United States, and no longer motivated by revolutionary ideals to work selflessly for a greater good.

  Notes

  1. Pablo Armando Fernández, Los niños se despiden (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1968).

  2. Personal interview with Pablo Armando Fernández by Philip Brenner in Washington, DC, April 18, 1980.

  3. Felix Roberto Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the US, 1959–1995 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), xxiv.

  4. Andrew Zimbalist and Susan Eckstein, “Patterns of Cuban Development: The First Twenty-Five Years,” in Cuba’s Socialist Economy: Toward the 1990s, ed. Andrew Zimbalist (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1987), 12–13.

  5. Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba, 40.

  6. Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba, 129–31.

  7. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 320–322; Peter Kornbluh and William M. LeoGrande, “Talking with Castro,” Cigar Aficionado, January 2009, 8.

  8. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 148–59. Also see Robert M. Levine, Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

  9. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 327–28; Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 160–63; Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 74–78.

  10. Barry Sklar, “Cuban Exodus 1980: The Context,” in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988), 344.

  11. Lisandro Pérez, “Immigrant Economic Adjustment and Family Organization: The Cuban Success Story Reexamined,” International Migration Review 20, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 4–20.

  12. Sklar, “Cuban Exodus 1980,” 340–41; Jo Thomas, “Crowd at Havana Embassy Grows,” New York Times, April 7, 1980, A1.

  13. As quoted in Schoultz, Th
at Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 355.

  14. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 210–12.

  15. Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 93–95, 100–102.

  16. Susan Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2009), 16, 19.

  Chapter 17

  Change and Rectification at Home and Abroad, 1980s

  “Hey, what do you think we are, bourgeois?” shouts a short, thin man in work clothes. “I make 138 pesos a month. You think I can afford to buy onions at two pesos a pound? Three lousy onions for two pesos. ¡Que va!” [No way!] All heads turn toward him, some voicing their agreement, others just nodding. The vendor remains imperturbable. “You don’t have to buy them, you know. It’s a free choice.” The worker looks up at him in disgust. “You’re all just a bunch of bandidos [bandits],” he snorts. “And just look at those hands. You’ve never even been near the soil!”

  —No Free Lunch1

  A New Economic Plan

  For most countries in Latin America, the 1980s were a “lost decade.” Western banks, which were flush with deposits from oil-rich countries that had benefited from the tenfold rise in petroleum prices during the previous decade, needed new places to invest. They turned to South America, where the region’s dictatorships were only too happy to use the easy loans to buy weapons, monumental projects, and personal luxuries. They spent little of the money on development and could not repay the loans when they came due. Some governments, such as Peru, had to make interest payments that were as much as 50 percent of the hard currency they earned from exports. Mexico depleted its hard currency reserves in 1982 and nearly defaulted on billions of dollars in loans. Cuba’s economic problems were not as severe, but the 1980 Mariel exodus had exposed decay eating away at the Revolution’s foundation.

  Economic Problems

  In the mid-1970s, Cuba had introduced reforms modeled on the Soviet system as a way of integrating into the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the Soviet-led trade group. For example, the government created its first five-year plan, which was accompanied by a program called the “New System of Economic Management and Planning” (SDPE in the Spanish acronym). JUCEPLAN, the Central Planning Board, was transformed from a mere coordinating body to the main unit that directed all central planning.

  There should have been little surprise that the new system would produce exactly the opposite of the intended results, namely, increased productivity and a greater number of products produced domestically. Productivity went down, diversification lagged, and the country had to rely even more on imports from the CMEA. Centralized rules, bureaucratic inflexibility, and prices unrelated to costs led to widespread popular criticism, with even top leaders themselves expressing frustration.

  The SDPE was supposed to decentralize economic activities, and it did achieve this goal with respect to farming. Until the mid-1970s, farmers were allowed to sell their produce only to the state, and the government pressured small farmers to work on state farms. Under the reforms, the government reduced the pressure to work for the state and provided incentives for private farmers to create cooperatives. The number of cooperatives increased from forty-four in 1977 to nearly 1,500 in 1983.2

  In 1980, in a seeming response to the Mariel exodus, the government permitted farmers to sell their surplus output—their production beyond the quota of products they had to sell to the state at fixed prices—to the public at “farmers’ markets.” The prices in these markets were unregulated and were generally much higher than at state stores. Still, the farmers’ markets were popular because they provided items, such as garlic, that were often difficult to find in stores. For pensioners on fixed incomes and less well-off Cubans, the ration book (libreta) continued to provide a safety net of basic commodities in state stores at a subsidized price.

  New regulations stipulated that the sellers at the farmers’ markets had to be the actual producers. They also had to provide their own transportation to the market. But the rule was honored in the breach, because farmers found that both selling and cultivating their crops was too time consuming and transporting produce to urban centers was too expensive. Instead, they turned to entrepreneurial private distributors who were willing to serve as illegal distributors and vendors.

  The farmers’ markets did increase the variety of food available to Cubans in urban areas, and perhaps even the total supply available. One report observed that farmers reduced waste because they could sell items that otherwise they would have discarded.3 But the markets also created undesired consequences. Some farmers illegally withheld some items from sale to the state in order to reap higher prices from the private markets. Some stole state property—seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer that they could not buy anywhere—in order to increase production of commodities for the farmers’ markets.

  A Plague of Intermediaries

  Because the state could sell farm equipment only to cooperatives, individual farmers were unable to plow their profits into capital investments—even items as mundane as a hose for irrigation. Instead, they and the newly wealthy middlemen engaged in conspicuous consumption. They bought expensive items intended for export, such as high-quality rum, and paid exorbitant prices for cars that only exemplary workers had been able to purchase.4 As the anecdote at the opening of this chapter highlights, the growing wealth of the vendors soon began to generate resentment among workers who were angry about the high prices and the fact that most sellers were not farmers themselves.5 In effect, the farmers’ markets and the legalization of some private services such as repairing cars were generating class divisions and income inequality that was anathema to the founding revolutionaries.

  Fidel made his displeasure known publicly as early as 1982. In a speech to the Young Communists, he described the middlemen as “a plague of intermediaries . . . who produced nothing and bought and hoarded products that in many cases the farmers should have sold to storehouses for normal distribution.”6 He acknowledged that farmers would want to earn more for their produce, just as consumers would want lower prices. But they all had to consider what was good for the country as a whole. The excesses caused by privatization, like the desire of Marielitos to leave the country, he believed, was evidence that there needed to be a greater emphasis on ideological development.

  By 1986, Cuba’s leaders were fed up with the markets. They had tried to control them by increasing taxes, monitoring sellers, and regulating what could be sold. But the tactics expanded the black market and middlemen continued to thrive. Finally, in April, Castro terminated the experiment. He shut down private farmers’ markets and denounced the distributors of agricultural produce who earned sums far greater than ordinary workers. “There are people who unfortunately confuse income earned from working,” he declared, “and from speculation and scams bordering on theft or that actually are theft.” At the same time, he criticized managers of state enterprises for applying capitalist principles—favoring the production of higher priced goods, which earned more money for their firms, over the production of goods needed for social projects.

  “These practices have to be rectified,” Castro asserted, by returning to the fundamental principles of the Cuban Revolution. “There are some,” he said,

  who think that socialism can be created without political work . . . I believe that the problems must be resolved on the basis of morals, honor and principles. . . . In the face of external enemies and danger that lurks from the outside . . . the Revolution will not only know how to overcome its weaknesses, its own weaknesses, it will know how to defend itself from external enemies; that this country will never return to capitalism, that this country will never revert to being imperialist property.7

  Rectification Campaign

  At a deferred session of the Third Party Congress in December 1986, the PCC set into motion the “process of the rectification of errors and combating nega
tive tendencies.” It involved doing away with the material incentives introduced by the SDPE reforms, ending the privatization of some services along with the farmers’ markets, and recentralizing economic decision-making. It also returned the Revolution to its 1960s roots in renewing Che Guevara’s emphasis on “moral incentives.”8

  Party leaders blamed the stagnation of Cuba’s economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s on their own blind adherence to Soviet practices.9 Cuba would now march in step to its own drummer. In setting Cuba on this course, Castro and the PCC pointedly rejected perestroika, the new economic model Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had just introduced. Perestroika was a set of proposals for economic restructuring through which the new Soviet leader hoped to reduce the state’s role in the economy and place greater reliance on market mechanisms.

  Though Castro pointed to commitments he shared with Gorbachev—for peace, ending world hunger and poverty, and fighting imperialism—in a February 1986 speech in Moscow, relations between the two leaders already were becoming cool. Whether disagreements about economic policy contributed to the tension between them is uncertain. Yet over the next five years, Cuba grew ever more distant from the Soviet Union.10

  Foreign Affairs

  Recall from chapter 15 that the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a major blow to Castro’s ambitions for the Non-Aligned Movement. He also had hoped that Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley would succeed in convincing OPEC members of the NAM to invest their newfound wealth—as a result of oil price hikes—in third world countries instead of New York banks. But this dream of South-South development evaporated as Manley’s demarche failed.

  Meanwhile, Cuba had to contend with increased hostility from the United States. By the end of the Carter administration, relations had returned to the depths of the early 1960s. Thus, when President Ronald Reagan took office he could rely on existing US hostility to provide firm ground from which to launch a more threatening policy toward Cuba.