Cuba

[p010] CUBA The First Stage By F. Rodriguez This article is translated from the Autumn 1961 issue of La Vérité, a French Trotskyist magazine. Even though it was written in April 1961, with a brief postscript added in December, we think it will provide readers of Lapour REVIEW with important background material and an original analysis of events in Cuba. Discussion is invited. LATIN America has ceased, for the European petty bourgeois, to be the exotic stage on which the ‘pronunciamentos’ of comic opera colonels follow one after the other. With Cuba, it has entered the framework of world politics. From L’Express to Le Figaro are found comments on the deeds and gestures of these ‘bearded ones’; some go into ecstasies over the enthusiasm of these people in sombreros who gesticulate in a country where it is so hot, others become indignant about these thought- less, excitable people who unloose ‘communism’ in a continent hitherto so well protected. Europe, through television, the cinema and the press, does not lack pictures of Cuba, but it is terribly lacking in ideas. The ‘left’ press shrinks neither from pompous articles nor discreet advice. However, militant workers need to know what is going on in Cuba. What is the prize in the struggle which makes this little country one of the centres of interest of LABOUR REVIEW- Spring, 1962 world politics? What is it all about? Where have we got to? These are the questions which, with the information at our disposal, we will try to answer, though not confining ourselves within the borders of Cuba only. For, quite definitely, it concerns the whole of Latin America. LATIN AMERICA, A SEMI-COLONIAL CONTINENT Formerly Spanish and Portuguese colonies, these South American nations gained their formal political independence in the 19th century, only to fall under the domination of European imperialism; then, between 1914 and 1930, under North American imperialism, which made men curse the name ‘Yankee’ from the Tropic of Cancer to Tierra del Fuego.

[p011] 8 Revolution in Latin America CUBA The First Stage By F. Rodriguez This article is translated from the Autumn 1961 issue of La Vérité, a French Trotskyist magazine. Even though it was written in April 1961, with a brief postscript added in December, we think it will provide readers of Lasour REVIEW with important background material and an original analysis of events in Cuba. Discussion is invited. LATIN America has ceased, for the European petty bourgeois, to be the exotic stage on which the ‘pronunciamentos’ of comic opera colonels follow one after the other. With Cuba, it has entered the framework of world politics. From L’Express to Le Figaro are found comments on the deeds and gestures of these ‘bearded ones’; some go into ecstasies over the enthusiasm of these people in sombreros who gesticulate in a country where it is so hot, others become indignant about these thought- less, excitable people who unloose ‘communism’ in a continent hitherto so well protected. Europe, through television, the cinema and the press, does not lack pictures of Cuba, but it is terribly lacking in ideas. The ‘left’ press shrinks neither from pompous articles nor discreet advice. However. militant workers need to know what is going on in Cuba. What is the prize in the struggle which makes this little country one of the centres of interest of LABOUR REVIEW-—Spring, 1962 Where have What is it all about? These are the questions which, with the information at our disposal, we will try to answer, though not confining ourselves within the borders world politics? we got to? of Cuba only. For, quite definitely, it concerns the whole of Latin America. LATIN AMERICA, A SEMI-COLONIAL CONTINENT Formerly Spanish and Portuguese colonies, these South American nations gained their formal political independence in the 19th century, only to fall under the domination of European imperialism; then, between 1914 and 1930, under North American imperialism, which made men curse the name “Yankee’ from the Tropic of Cancer to Tierra del Fuego.

[p012] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE In all these different countries, it is large North American companies which hold the sources of power, of raw materials and foodstuffs, which today provide 35 per cent of the value of United States imports. Moreover, the rule, in Latin America, is the exploitation of one single resource in each country; it is no distortion of the truth to state that Venezuela is the country of oil, Bolivia of tin, Costa Rica of coffee, and Cuba of sugar. The continent also serves as a market for the manu- factured goods of North American industry; exports to Latin America make up 27 per cent of the US total. Imperialism has been able, behind the screen of the Monroe Doctrine, to keep this special preserve for itself. The slogan ‘America for the Americans’ has had, for half a century, a very precise meaning: ‘America for the Yankees’. No foreign firm is able to compete with the American monopoly; in the plantation countries, American firms have even gone as far as to buy or have assigned to them all the best land, even leaving it uncultivated, in order to control production and prevent a fall in prices. North American imperialism has achieved this exclusive domination without much difficulty because of its weight in the economy of each country. In Cuba, 49 per cent of the sugar-cane plantations used to belong to Yankee firms; in Guatemala, the United Fruit Company, Frutera, has for a long time been the sole owner; with its plantations and its uncultivated land, its railways, its roads and its ports, not to mention its own administration and police. It is not surprising if, in these circumstances, such powerful firms take on the appearance of giants beside the feeble Latin American states such as have developed from the profound social crisis unleashed on the continent by imperialist penetration. THE SOCIAL CRISIS PRODUCED BY THE PENETRATION OF IMPERIALISM With the exception of Argentina, the River Plate countries and the south of Brazil, the Latin American countries at the beginning of the 19th century presented the aspect of old _ colonial Structures: the peasant mass, almost exclusively made up of Indians, reduced to a semi-servile state, was under the domination of a feudal class of Spanish and Portuguese conquerors. Then, while overthrowing the equilibrium of traditional society by its conquest of markets, imperialist penetration strengthened the dominant classes of the old social structure. Faced with a pauperised peasantry capable of impressive revolts, imperialism chose to support the feudal classes by sharing its profits with them to keep them in their role of policemen for the defence of its own interests. It is significant that 9 Mexico, when it was invaded by foreign capital, experienced a rebirth of agrarian feudalism, with large estates to which the peasants found themselves attached like serfs. There were, at that time, 300 haciendas of more than 10,000 hectares, 11 of more than 100,000 and seven of more than 250,000.! Thus, as in all other semi-colonial countries, imperialist penetration brought about in Latin America a development opposite to that resulting from the growth of capitalism in Europe. Not only were the feudalists and moneylenders its only serious political allies, kept in place by imperialism which made them its ‘local agents’, but at the same time the ruin of the artisans in the towns and villages through competition from the products of US large-scale industry, forced the mass of the native population to turn to the land for subsistence. With the exodus of the rural population to the towns experienced in Western Europe in the same period, we find contrasted the ‘return to the land’ in the colonies and semi-colonies,2 a return to the land which obviously meant increasing misery for those already there and for the newcomers. In other words, imperialist penetration, far from creating the conditions for industrialisation, made it extremely difficult. On the one hand, the main- tenance of high rates of interest and profit from exploitation of land deflected native capital from all other forms of investment, notably industrial. On the other hand, the lowering of the standard of living brought about by the destruction of the traditional supplementary means of livelihood, hindered the formation of a real market which could absorb the products of a native industry. There was no need at all for a ‘colonial pact’ to prevent industrialisation: for 190 million inhabitants there were in 1955 less than 6 million radio sets, and a little more than 4 million cinema seats. Brazil, which every year produces a quarter as many pairs of shoes as it has inhabitants, is desperately seeking a market in which to dispose of them. Further, in Latin America, there will be no industrialization except in certain definite circum- stances. In order to exploit their riches more efficiently, the imperialists sometimes themselves create the necessary industries: thus in Cuba the Amer:can Sugar Co. used to control 60 per cent of the refineries. The two world wars, upsetting the pattern of trade and creating favourable conditions, have made possible a real wave of industrialization, leaving intact, however, the general characteristics and relations between the main economic activities. 1. Victor Alba: Le mouvement ouvrier en Amerique Latine. (1 hectare equals 24 acres.) 2. Recalling the remark of an English governor, quoted by Marx, ‘The bones of the weavers whiten the plains of India.’ Fritz Sternberg in Le Conflit du Siécle, gives a deiai‘ed study of this type of evolution.

[p013] 10 SOCIAL CLASSES The social structure of semi-colonial countries is, then, very different from that which has grown up in the advanced countries. It is difficult to dis- tinguish in this structure a genuine bourgeoisie. The dominant class has nothing in common with the entrepreneur class which in England, France and Germany launched the attack on the old world. It has arisen simultaneously from the old feudal ruling classes and imperialism. A thousand family and personal ties unite the group of men who hold at the same time vast estates and mining shares, petroleum shares, ranches and plantations; their incomes are derived as much from the surplus value produced by the proletariat as from the super- exploitation of the peasantry or the interest on loans at high interest. This oligarchy bears different names according to the country, but everywhere it shows this fundamental characteristic of the intertwined interests of landlordism and imperialism. While the European bourgeoisie strove to shatter the feudal state structure, the Latin American oligarchy cannot take even a single step towards agrarian reform, preparatory to establishing a market, without under- mining one of the pillars of its own power, its landed property. THE PEASANTS The great mass of the population lives on the land. In.Cuba, the census of 1953 showed that, out of a population of 1,972,266 persons, 221,939 (i.e., about 11 per cent) were owners or occupiers of some sort, and 568,799 (i.e., 28.8 per cent) were agricultural workers. The great majority of the 100,000 owners were very small, hardly managing to scrape a living from their land: owners of less than 100 hectares constituted 92 per cent of the total number, and occupied only 30 per cent of the acreage. As for the various tenants, they are made up of 46,000 genuine tenants enjoying written or oral leases, 7,000 sub- tenants with a still less secure legal position, 33,000 sharecroppers and 13,700 ‘precarious ones’, ‘taxable and subject to labour at will’ (legal description of the mediaeval serf), since they enjoy no right to security of tenure and are compelled to make the payments demanded by the all-powerful owner .. . If one adds that the Cuban farm worker was un- employed on the average 185 days per year, one can better grasp the reasons for the poverty in Cuba, that wonderful island where, in 1953, 9.1 per cent of rural houses had electricity, and 2.3 per cent running water indoors, 54 per cent having no sort of w.c. and 85 per cent no water supply, neither tap, nor tank, nor well. UNO statistics also give very significant examples LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 of what the bourgeois economists call the ‘under- development’ of the Latin American countries. The consumption of milk and meat is from 6 to 10 times less than in the US. Bolivia, with its 1,200 calories per day per person, compared with the vital minimum of 2,800, is the most tragic example of undernourishment, permanent and general. For the continent as a whole the expectation of life is 30 years, comparable to that of India, while that of France is over 60 years. Tuberculosis is responsible for a third of all deaths, 75 per cent are illiterate, and there are 180 teachers to 100,000 inhabitants; according to the country, 20 to 25 per cent of the children of school age attend school, 25 to 30 per cent of the inhabitants normally go barefoot, and 30 per cent wear home-made clothes. A calculation based on the ‘average annual income’ shows that 20 to 30 days work are necessary to buy a garment which in the US would need two and a half days’ wages. THE WORKERS The number of wage-workers has continuously increased, both absolutely and relatively. The working class today comprises from 10 to 25 per cent of the total population in the different countries. It is far from being homogeneous: its lower strata remain closely linked to the peasantry. The un- employed worker returns to the land. The manual worker moves from the mine or the factory to the plantation and back again. But if the regimented serfs in the latifundia have no reason to envy the miserable slaves of the tin mines, the oil and metal workers, with the social advantages which they have conquered, eight-hour day, holidays, social security, appear as a privileged layer with a standard of living far above that of the poverty-stricken masses. It has taken years of savage political struggle for the Bolivian miners to stop fighting the other workers’ unions, to build a united front between them and the starving mass of Indians, a ‘reserve army of labour’ and potential strike-breakers. The problem of the unity of workers and peasants against the oligarchy which exploits them is the number one problem. It is sometimes made easier by local circumstances; in Cuba, the 47,000 workers in the sugar refining industry are distributed through a number of ultra-modern factories, each in contact with the agricultural workers on sugar plantations who have, more than once, learned from them proletarian methods of organization and struggle. THE MIDDLE CLASSES Imperialist penetration has destroyed the new- born rural and urban petty bourgeoisie, but it has at

[p014] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE the same time created new middle layers, small traders, technicians, clerks, functionaries, and professional men. This ‘middle class by training’, with the students as its nursery, constitutes the most unstable element in this society both in its actions and political attitudes. Like the essentially bourgeois layers to which they are linked, the members of this class are strictly dependent on the oligarchy, having in common with the manufacturers and big traders a social position which prevents them from getting to the top of the social pyramid, monopolized by the oligarchy, while they frequently know themselves to be superior in ability and ‘merit’. They try to get more money for their services, and particularly for the part they play in the exploitation of the workers. It is usually the army which provides them with the instrument to gain a political fortune, and also a fortune in the ordinary sense. But in recent decades, their aspirations have been expressed through ‘mass’ parties of a new type: the Venezuelan Democratic Action of Betancourt, the Bolivian National Revolutionary Movement of Paz Estensoro, the Argentine Justicialist Party of Juan Peron. In the struggle to obtain from imperialism a fair share of the profits, they are forced to rally the workers and peasants behind them, and they have succeeded on various occasions. Peron was the hero of the peons, agricultural workers for whom he won the right to wages, and the leader of the descamisados (urban poor), mostly of working-class origin. Paz Estensoro is today in the course of reconstructing the Bolivian bourgeois state, thanks to the support of the labour bureaucracy, around the trade union central committee led by the miners’ leader, Juan Lechin. Individually, a number of people of middle-class origin have turned towards the urban or rural proletariat without trying to make use of them for their class interests. In the most backward sections, it is often the intellectuals who have become militants who have organized trade unions in a ‘professional’ manner and founded the first socialist groups. More frequently, recently, it is student demonstrations which have been the signals for revolutions and for the entry of the workers and peasants into the struggle. THE STATE For Latin America, like the rest of the world, has entered the era of revolutions: that of ‘pronuncia- mentos’ is largely over. The different clans of the oligarchy had for a long time been able to settle accounts with each other by recourse to military coups d’etat or by faked elections. But with the awakening of the workers’ movement and the appearance of peasants’ movements, the ‘colonels’ 11 have been compelled to be more prudent if they are to avoid playing the part of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Several experiences have effectively shown that the workers can seize the opportunity of an armed struggle between their class enemies to intervene on their own acount. Also there has in the recent period been a tendency to the stiffening of repression with the ferocious dictatorships of Trujillo and Batista, supported by the dollar. The brutality of such regimes is the measure of their social parasitism, of their congenital feebleness and the fear which the masses inspire in them. It took the Cuban revolution to make known in Europe the police methods of Batista, the torture, mutilations and castrations. Such methods, small change in these countries, constitute the last defence of these oligarchic regimes threatened by the revolution. THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION It was Mexico which experienced the first real Latin American revolution. The organized workers’ movement appeared under the influence of immi- grants in the last quarter of the 19th century; the original ‘ Workers’ Congress’ was replaced by secret revolutionary unions, inspired by the example of the American IWW.? It was not until 1912, after years of bitter struggle, that the first Mexican workers’ centre, the Casa del Obrero Mundial, was formed. In the year 1910, a part of the army rose, with the support of a section of the middle class and the national bourgeoisie, against the dictatorship of the oligarch Porfirio Diaz. The peasant discontent which expressed itself in this war soon took revolutionary forms with the guerilla campaigns carried on in the north under Pancho Villa and in the south under Zapata. Villa and Zapata actually took over Mexico City in 1915. It is a remarkable fact that these rough peasants who had destroyed the fortified chateaux of the landowners, massacred the proprietors in a merciless struggle and collectively worked the land which they had seized, respected out of discipline a capital which any other army would have pillaged. This did not, however, prevent the Casa del Obrero Mundial from signing what amounted to a treaty of alliance with the liberal nationalist general Carranza; the ‘red battalions’ controlled by the workers’ leaders fought alongside the army against Zapata’s guerrillas. Thus the workers’ movement allied itself with the growing bourgeoisie and the oligarchy, who put aside their internal struggles, making common cause to crush the peasants’ revolution. Its leaders hoped 3. Industrial Workers of the World, a mass syndicalist organization.

[p015] 12 Seated: Generals Urbina, Villa, Zapata and Fierro at the presidential palace, Mexico City, during the civil war. to get this policy accepted by their followers, they made use of the genuine distrust of the developed worker for the rural savage, the hostility of the anti-clerical town-dweller toward the local priests who played so great a role in the ranks of Zapata’s army. It required, however, many years and much cunning to defeat the peasants’ revolt. It was not until 1919 that Zapata was killed, and then by trea- chery. In 1923 Villa was assassinated, after having kept in suspense the American troops commanded by General Pershing. On the morrow of victory, the working-class ally was put in his place: the ‘red battalions’ were dissolved. But the revolution had shaken Mexico too deeply and for too long a time for a pure and simple restoration to be possible. In the south, Zapata’s men had destroyed the great feudal holdings. The oligarchy had to make concessions, to pay the price necessary to prevent the alliance between the workers and peasants. Education was secularized. The workers obtained equal pay between Mexicans and foreigners (their oldest demand), the eight-hour day, the right of association and the right to strike. The Constitution of 1917 outlined an agrarian reform, the first on the continent. It envisaged the expropriation and distribution of large estates over 500 hectares. However, once arms had been laid down, this reform was realised only very slowly. Out of 196 million hectares, 3 millions, that is, 1.8 per cent, were distributed to 300,000 families by 1926; 9 million, that is, 5.4 per cent, to 900,000 families by 1934, 17 years after the Constitution. In 1940, at the end of Cardenas’ government, 18 million hectares, that is, 11 per cent, had been distributed to 1,800,000 families. Under the Presidency of General Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico was in fact profoundly transformed, pursuing in a way the revolution begun in 1910. The General, 100 per cent Indian, a remarkable politician, wished to ‘modernise’ Mexico. In realising this bourgeois-democratic revolution, he enjoyed the constant support of the Mexican working class movement, entirely controlled at this time by the LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 Communist Party. Utilising the Zapatist tradition, and to prevent the division of the land from ending in the rapid ruin of the small peasants receiving it, he pushed co-operatives—the ejidos, the name of the old peasant communities—enabling the common use of equipment and government credits. The Cardenas government also undertook the struggie to bring under its law the great American firms. It encouraged and protected the formation of unions against the oil companies, which were real states within the state, with their own police and their own armies on their concessions, enabling them to refuse to submit to Mexican law on social and tax matters. The obstinacy of the big firms who would give way neither to strikes, even violent ones, nor to the decisions of the Mexican courts, finally forced Cardenas to decree, in 1938, the nationaliza- tion of 18 American and British firms belonging to the oil cartel. But it was only thanks to the world war that Mexico finally obtained recognition of this measure: the oil cartel, in the wider interests of capitalism, resigned itself to accepting the indemnity offered by the Mexican government, rather than risk keeping a dangerous revolutionary agitation on the southern borders of the US in war time. Besides, by the wish of the bourgeois leaders, the revolution stopped there: the Mexican bourgeoisie profited by the war to consolidate its conquests and to indus- trialise. The Mexican revolution after 30 years of con- tinuous but unequal development, has ended in a profound transformation: henceforth there exists a solid industrial and rural bourgeoisie. Mexican society in many ways recalls that of the developed countries. Foreign capital has to disguise itself as ‘national capital’. The working class, organized in unions of a North American type, divested of all Stalinist influence, and tightly linked to the state apparatus, does not question the regime which it has helped to build. However, imperialism main- tains firm positions, both economic and political, and conquers more of them; there exist in the north great estates of more than 200,000 hectares, and the poor peasant suffers from land hunger. After an interruption of 19 years, the agrarian reform was started again in 1959. Thus the Cuban Revolution awoke many echoes in the fatherland of the first Latin American peasant revolution. The Mexican possessing classes realised that the revolution had merely been interrupted: the essential problems remain. THE GUATEMALAN REVOLUTION Guatemala, four times the size of Belgium, with 34 million inhabitants, is at the other end of the scale of development of Latin American states. In 1900

[p016] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE an official Chilean mission searched in vain for a single school. In fact, this country was one great estate, the Frutera. Up to 1943, under successive dictators, Guatemala did not even have law: its courts knew only the death penalty, applied equally to oppositionists and robbers. It was with a student demonstration, turned into an insurrection by the intervention of some of the military, that, in 1944, the Guatemalan revolution began. For 10 years, under President Arevalo, this little country experi- enced the strongest revolutionary wave in Latin America since the time of Zapata. The workers organized, fought, won their demands. The peasants formed unions, the agricultural workers fought for their wages. Uncultivated land was occupied and cultivated, great estates threatened and attacked. Arevalo’s successor, Colonel Arbenz, promulgated an agrarian reform. It envisaged the expropriation of uncultivated land—with compensation — and _ its redistribution among poor or landless peasants. But the domains of the United Fruit Co., adjudged to be of ‘industrial use’, were not touched. It was a matter, as Alba wrote, ‘of a measure of sound capitalist economics, with the object of giving the land without hands to the hands without land.’ However, the imperialists became anxious. The words ‘agrarian reform’ are in themselves revolu- tionary. The victorious struggle of the workers and peasants overflowed the frontiers of Guatemala, and the contagion might be dangerous. The American ambassador, Patterson, uttered threats, and his successor, Peurifroy, organized armed _ counter- revolutionary action, with the practical support of the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Against the intervention which was being openly prepared, Colonel Arbenz looked for arms. All the capitalist countries refused them. He bought them in Czechoslovakia: the USSR supported him, and in exchange he leant on the Guatemalan Communists whose party developed rapidly, gaining many key positions, notably at the head of bodies applying the agrarian reform. Workers and peasants rallied to defend their revolution, formed militias, demanded arms. Arbenz gave them none: to resist the mercenaries of imperialism he relied on the national army, increased the officers’ pay, multiplied his reassuring declarations on the maintenance of order and defence of property. When the Washington- recruited commando of Colonel Castillo Armas, equipped with modern weapons including airplanes, crossed the frontier, the army cadres rallied to it. Arbenz was deposed by the chief of staff whom he himself had just nominated. The disarmed workers’ and peasants’ militias were crushed, machine-gunned without being able to defend them- selves. A ferocious repression descended on the country: the world Stalinist press produced a 13. barrage of protests against American intervention: even Jacques Soustelle, in France, joined in. But there was total silence on the ignominious conditions of the fall of the Arbenz regime. The world working-class movement identified the revolution with the president-colonel who had delivered it unarmed, with the complicity of the Communist Party, to the soldiers of imperialism. Only a vanguard minority in Latin America gave considera- _ tion to the lesson. FIDEL CASTRO It was Cuba’s turn to take over, with the movement inspired by the action of a young man, universally known today, Fidel Castro. Born in 1926, son of a large landowner, educated by the Jesuits, Fidel Castro Ruz studied law at the same time as carrying on a precocious political activity. His marriage made him the son-in-law and brother-in-law of ministers of the dictator Batista. President of the Havana law students, he first of all fought in the ranks of the petty-bourgeois democratic party, the Authentic Party. At this stage his only objective Fidel Castro was to obtain free elections in Cuba and to fight against the corruption of successive governments and of the administration. However, several electoral setbacks and Batista’s preventive coup d’etat of 1952 convinced him that the cards were stacked against such methods and that violence was necessary. He then decided on a terrorist act in the tradition of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries. The attack on the Moncada barracks, July 26, carefully pre- pared for a year, led by a group of 200 students and intellectuals which he had won over and organized, would, he thought, procure him arms and radio transmitters with which to call all Cubans to ris against the dictatorship. But the adventure ended badly: those who were not killed in the attack were captured and tortured

[p017] 14 and beaten. Thanks both to the delay in his arrest and to the intervention of his family and the clergy, Fidel Castro was not tortured, but tried. A brilliant orator, and speaking simultaneously as accused and advocate, he reached an audience outside the walls of the court room. The Minister of the Interior had to declare that he was ill in order to prevent his having a public trial. Behind closed doors, in the presence of the judges, of six journalists sworn to secrecy, and of a hundred armed guards, he made his celebrated five-hour indictment in the guise of a defence: ‘History will absolve me and condemn Batista.” On October 16, 1953, he was condemned to 16 years in prison. But from that day on he was known throughout Cuba. He came out of the Pines prison 2 years later, amnestied with the others on May 15, 1955, having studied and reflected. After July he took refuge in Mexico; then, in the US, he made the rounds of the ‘enlightened ’ capitalists and rich émigrés, collect- ing 50,000 dollars. He then prepared a new attack. Under the direction of Alberto Bayo, an ex-service officer of the Spanish war, 80 Cuban émigrés received guerrilla training. The most brilliant pupil was to become Fidel Castro’s indispensable lieuten- ant: he was the Argentinian Ernesto ‘ Che’ Guevara, a doctor, who had fled from the Peronist police, reached Guatemala, lived through the revolution and been present at its final defeat. On December 5, 1956, having announced from the rooftops the attack he was preparing, Castro disembarked in Cuba with 82 companions, lightly armed. Storm and bom- bardment had forced them to abandon their heavy arms, ammunition and food supplies. They set out to reach the mountains, but only 12 men reached the Sierra Maestra, 12 men armed with machine guns and with no contact with the local population, but who were soon to put to flight the 50,000 perfectly armed and equipped men of Batista. THE CONQUEST Scarcely two years later the 12 men had carried it off: their army, the ‘Rebel Army’, entered the capital. These men, thenceforward known as the ‘barbudos’ (bearded ones), had leant much and changed quite a bit. Guevara witnesses: “The men who arrived in Havana after two years of bitter struggle were not the same from an ideological point of view as those who took part in the first phase of the struggle. Their distrust of the peasant had been transformed into affection and respect for his qualities. Their complete ignorance of rural life had been transformed into a knowledge of the poor peasantry.’ Fidel Castro and his companions would have been LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 condemned to death if they had not been able to win over to themselves the peasants of the mountains, and then those of the entire Cuban countryside. They achieved this by struggling with them against their enemies, the great landowners, and the private and state police, offering them a programme of agrarian reform and a start in realising it in the ‘liberated territories’. As Huberman. and Sweezy wrote: ‘At first the peasants merely hid the rebels: before many months had passed the peasants as a class supported the rebels: from passive assistants they developed into active participants... The students, technicians, lawyers, doctors, teachers who fled from the towns, organized the mass of poor peasants and agricultural workers whose confidence had been won by the first rebels. It can be stated that the ‘Rebel Army’ was a genuine peasant army. Those who led it, certainly, like Castro himself, were sons of middle-class families or of members of the oligarchy, in general intellectuals or politicians. But one must note, with Theodore Draper, correspondent of the Reporter, that ‘while the intellectuals and Bolshevik revolutionaries were closely linked politic- ally and psychologically to the Russian working class, the intellectuals and revolutionary politicians who follow Castro indentify themselves emotionally with the peasants (guajiros)’. Let us also note that it is the peasant detachments whose role the leaders praise most willingly. After the victory, Castro hailed them as ‘the flower and the heart of the most effective and the most solid sections of our revolu- tionary army.’ The peasants supported the Rebel Army because they had confidence in it and in its programme. Other social groups, in the towns, supported it only because, very soon, its victory began to appear to them the quickest and most effective way of getting rid of Batista: here the programme was of less importance than the immediate effect. The workers took part in the resistance, in workshops, in print shops and in secret arsenals. The middle classes, the bourgeoisie and even some of the oligarchs financed the civil resistance of the Castro partisans, often from fear, certainly, but also from an opportunistic attitude to a growing movement, and because the Batista dictatorship, as it lost ground, became con- tinuously more brutal, more ferocious. The Cuban Communist Party, almost alone, stood aside for many months. True, it no longer carried on a policy of support for Batista, but thought that ‘to overthrow Batista, it is necessary to have a coalition which goes beyond the bounds of anti-imperialism and includes of necessity forces which are not anti- imperialist’.4 Criticising Castro, who did not bring into the leadership of his movement the bourgeois 4. See Rodriguez, one of the leaders of the Communist Party, quoted by Julien, La Revolution Cubaine.

[p018] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE and oligarchs who provided money, the Communist Party took no part in the general strike called by Castro’s rebels on April 9, 1958, but joined the Movement some months later when it became obvious that the days of the Batista regime were numbered, and that no one but Castro was capable of taking power. The last campaign, in the last months of 1958, was a triumphal march: Batista’s army crumbled, the rats left the sinking ship, the more prudent rallied round with enthusiasm. One after the other the towns gave themselves up to the ‘ bearded ones’. By January 1, 1959, they were masters of the country. THE FIRST STAGE For many observers, it was hardly necessary to expect any very new developments. Castro the victor, master of the state apparatus, proceeded to organize elections from which he emerged completely victorious to put into operation a few minor reforms, finally to make imperialism pay a price—a limited one—for its support of Batista. Fundamentally nothing was changed: Batista himself had begun his career with popular support. However, right from the beginning, the American press unleashed a violent campaign against the new regime on the question of the anti-Batista repression. Must one see in this, as many commentators have done, a sign of the complete hostility of imperialism, made apparent from the very beginning? This repression, which affected only the principal torturers and those responsible for them, displayed, to the eyes of imperialism, the disquieting characteristics of taking place in broad daylight, real mass meetings accom- panying the sessions of the military tribunals: 20,000 people were present, and not in silence, at the televised trial of Commandant Sosa Blanco in the Palace of Sport in Havana. It seems, however, that the press campaign was above all intended to frighten the Cuban leaders and to recall them to a more correct idea of their state of dependence. At the same time, six great American firms extended to the new government a credit of 14 million dollars: for its part, United Fruit, mistress of the ‘green empire’ which had just overthrown the Arbenz regime, advanced 500,000 dollars to that of Castro.5 In fact, the measures which followed the victory of the rebels were not in any way really revolu- tionary. Fidel, commandant of the Rebel Army, kept apart from the government. It was a moderate bourgeois, a judge with a reputation for integrity, Manuel Urrutia, who became the new president of the republic. Miro Cardona,® prime minister, and 5. Julien, op cit., p. 107. 6. Today he is one of the leaders of the Cuban exiles in the US. 15 Agramonte, Minister of Foreign Affairs, were liberal politicians, and the Minister of the Interior was the owner of a large daily. As Huberman and Sweezy wrote, ‘The face which the Cuban Revolution first showed to the world was that of a quite respectable middle-class regime.’ Certainly, there were important measures. The army, some 50,000 officers, NCOs and men, was officially dissolved; this was certainly a powerful blow against the forces of the oligarchy which, in all Latin America countries, has always used the army as a sort of super-police for repressive pur- poses. A few days later the police force was dissolved, and this, too, was an important measure. It must, however, be emphasized that the new Cuban leaders hardly had any choice, and that the legisla- tion only confirmed the actual state of affairs. Army and police had, in fact, been completely dissolved in the preceding weeks by the action of the masses: to make them rise from their ashes would have been an impossible task in view of the hatred of them which had grown up under the Batista regime. However, the navy, less involved in repressive tasks, and which at the last minute had rallied to Castro, was not touched. Besides, the new government immediately began to rebuild a police force with men enjoying the confidence of Castro: thus he created a specialised repressive body, on the bour- geois model like the preceding one, but benefiting from the ‘revolutionary’ prestige of those who led and composed it. In addition, the Castro army, which preserved officially its name of ‘ Rebel Army’ was ostensibly used for peaceful tasks, public works, building of roads and houses. The barracks were changed into educational centres. The rest of the state apparatus remained intact. High officials were naturally purged when they were too compromised with the dictatorship. But the structure of the administrative machine was pre- served, although a closer supervision resulted in some prosecutions for corruption, which gave it a ‘new look’. The wave of purification did not even touch the administration of justice, and an apologist for the Castro regime as zealous as George Soria is com- pelled to write: ‘As for the judiciary, whose attitude during the black years had hardly been a model of courage, it was strangely enough completely spared: the magistrates who had given judgment under Batista continued to give it under Castro.’? The whole of the diplomatic personnel remained at its posts, which made counter-revolutionary activities much easier for quite a long time. Finally, the powerful newspapers, controlled by foreign enter- prises and the oligarchy, continued to appear freely. Consequently, there was nothing in the initial measures of the new regime, not even the-5 per cent 7. G. Soria, Cuba a Pheure Castro, p. 178.

[p019] 16 reduction in rents which contributed enormously to its popularity, which transgressed the framework of bourgeois democracy. Further, in April 1959, Fidel Castro went to the US in the hope of obtaining comprehensive support, and everywhere he made reassuring declarations. Thus, on April 25: ‘ We are against all forms of dictatorship ... That is why we are against communism . . . The communist state with its totalitarian conception, sacrifices the rights of man. . Our revolution applies democratic principles to carry out a humanist revolution.’ Was the Cuban revolution, thus begun under the banner of the petty-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and anti-communist ideology of the ‘humanist revolu- tion’, blessed by the church (since the almoner of Catholic Action saw in it the victory of the ‘Christian spirit? over ‘pagan materialism’) going to undertake a limited ‘modernization’, canalizing the masses and reassuring imperialism? Many still thought so. But very soon its rhythm was going to quicken. The first internal measures brought counterthrusts from imperialism, and each blow given by the US led to further acceleration. There can be no doubt as to the way in which the Cuban leaders were directed along this road, since in 1959 they did not conceal the moderate character of their programme. ‘Che’ Guevara, very honestly, acknow- ledges the empirical nature of the Castro policy, which allowed itself to be led by events and to abandon its earlier programme, when he writes: ‘With the exception of our agrarian reform, which the people of Cuba wanted and set on foot them- selves, all our revolutionary measures were a direct reaction against the aggression of the monopolists . . . US pressure on Cuba made necessary a radicali- sation of the revolution.’ AGRARIAN REFORM Agrarian reform was definitely the first objective of the peasant army which had carried on the guerrilla war against Batista. The National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), created to carry out the reform and to organise the powerful peasant movement which had developed in the course of the struggle, was, in fact, the child of the army, which already, without waiting for legal sanction, had started on ‘reform’ by attacking the large estates of the leaders and friends of the regime, as well as others, designated for the occasion ‘properties badly acquired ’. The law itself was promulgated on May 17, 1959. One cannot but agree with the analysis of it made by René Dumont, who judged it ‘lacking in all revolutionary character, often recalling the Italian Jaws of 1949/50, inspired by the Christian Demo- LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 crats’.8 It provided for the expropriation of all estates of more than 400 hectares, allowing for the preservation of areas of ‘progressive’ cultivation up to 1,340 hectares, of sugar plantations and those whose yield was 50 per cent above the national average. All rented lands, in whatever form, were also expropriated. All the owners were in principle compensated. The distributed lands were inalien- able. The reality was quite different. The armed peasants, as we have seen, had not always waited for the passing of the law. Even after, they kept to its provisions only very approximately. The peasant army, either directly or through the INRA, speeded things up, did not burden itself with formalities or precise measures, and, quite rightly, regarded all the large estates as ‘properties badly acquired ’. Moreover, one article of the law provided for the sequestration of any land whatever if it were ‘in the interests of agriculture’: this article was often to serve to cover up actions taken outside of the law, or the wide interpretation of a document which those appointed to apply it had not read. The result was that in two years, three-fifths of the agricultural land of the island had passed under the control of INRA and that less than a tenth of the expropriated Jand had been paid for in money or in goods. In addition, consequent upon an article of the law imposed, it is said, by Fidel Castro himself, against the advice of the experts, INRA had as its object the organization, ‘wherever it is possible’, of collective cultivation of the expropriated land. The old traditions of the agricultural worker ‘first of all a proletarian, demanding higher wages and _ better conditions of employment, but not always wanting to cultivate on his own account’? as they were expressed in the Zapata movement, were here joined to the economic problem which had also faced Cardenas, that of avoiding the division of the land into holdings so small as to be prejudicial to pro- ductivity and the final return to vast estates. Thus INRA organizes cooperatives which enjoy State aid in capital and equipment, which are administered by its appointed officials and which compete among themselves. For they are integrated into a market which obeys the laws of capitalism and also coexists with independent peasants, about one-third, owning less than 400 hectares and consequently untouched by the reform. The nature of the regime is not in the least changed by ‘collectivisation’ which intro- duces cooperatives into a capitalist framework, opening up a perspective of the enrichment of some and the ruin of others through competition. More- over it does not solve the problem of the agricultural workers who did not receive land during the reform. 8. Article on the Agrarian Reform, Esprit, April 1961. 9. Dumont, op cit., p. 592. Continued on page 25

[p020] That devil Wilkes