STEVE CUSHION is a retired university lecturer with a Ph.D. in Caribbean Labor History who lives in the East End of London. For twenty years, he worked as a bus driver in London, and has been an active socialist and trade unionist all his adult life. He is currently adviser to the Museum of Labor History on the digitization of their archives.
A Hidden History
Cuban Revolution
How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrilla Victory
by STEVE CUSHION
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2016 by Steve Cushion
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the publisher.
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Monthly Review Press
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CONTENTS
1. Organized Labor in the 1950s
8. The First Year of the New Cuba
Conclusion: What Was the Role of Organized Labor in the Cuban Insurrection?
For Mary Turner (1931–2013),historian, teacher, comrade, and loyal friend
FOREWORD
The war constitutes an encouraging example of what can be achieved by the tenacity and revolutionary will of the people. The revolutionary armed combatants, in the final phase of the struggle, scarcely numbered three thousand men.… Our workers and peasants, integrated into the Rebel Army, with the support of the middle class, pulverized the tyrannous regime, destroyed the armed apparatus of oppression, and achieved the full independence of the country. The working class, with its revolutionary general strike in the final battle, contributed decisively to the triumph [of the Revolution]. This brilliant feat of our Revolution in the military terrain is little known outside the country. It has been published in anecdotal and sporadic form, but a documented and systematic history of it remains to be written.1
— FIDEL CASTRO
Fidel Castro’s retrospective analysis of the insurrectionary phase of the Cuban Revolution, delivered at the first Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1975, recognizes the contribution of the working class to the revolutionary struggle, but confines this contribution to two areas: active service in the rebel army and the general strike of January 1, 1959. Whereas the latter receives minimal attention in historical accounts of the Revolution, the deeds of the small band of revolutionary guerrillas continue to exert a powerful hold on popular and scholarly depictions of its eventual triumph. Despite the rhetorical invocations of the pueblo (the people) by the revolutionary leadership, and despite the official embrace of Marxist-Leninist ideology from 1961, there remains surprisingly little documented and systematic analysis of the contribution of Cuban workers to the eventual overthrow of the detested Batista regime. Yet, as this engaging and meticulously researched book amply demonstrates, a militant and well-organized labor movement, often operating independently of union leaders, played a pivotal role in the victory of the Cuban insurrection, not only through the final coup de grâce of the 1959 general strike, but in myriad actions that served to defend workers’ interests, resist state repression, and materially support the armed struggle. Thus there was a third arm to the revolutionary forces, a labor movement, which has been consistently ignored by both general and labor historians of Cuba alike.
Scholarly neglect of the role of organized labor in the Cuban Revolution can be partly explained by the nature of the official trade union organization, the Confederacíon de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), under the leadership of Eusebio Mujal. As this book vividly describes, the CTC leadership, working hand in glove with the Batista regime, was responsible for gross abuses including interference in union elections, removal from office of elected officials, expulsions of troublesome officials from the unions, and discrediting individual leaders by false or exaggerated accusations of Communism.2 By 1957, in the wake of further anti-communist purges carried out with the full backing of state security forces, the CTC was openly operating as Mujal’s personal fiefdom. However, in conflating organized labor with the corrupt bureaucracy of the CTC, scholars have overlooked or underestimated the activities of ordinary workers and the critical role they played in resisting not only the corrupt trade union leadership but also the iniquities of the Batista regime. Steve Cushion’s work calls for a broader definition of organized labor, looking beyond the formal structures of the trade union federation to include the multiplicity of unofficial, informal structures through which ordinary workers defend their interests. This includes the activities of shop stewards, independently minded union officials, strike committees, regional committees, mass meetings, and unofficial, as well as clandestine, networks of militants, all of which make up the wider labor movement and interact together to produce the dynamic of industrial action.
What emerges in this book is a lively and variegated picture of working-class activism that sheds new light on the struggles of workers, ranging from those employed in the more traditionally proletarian sectors of sugar, transport, textiles, and utilities to those in shops, department stores, and white-collar professions in offices and banks. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources including material from local and provincial archives, interviews with veterans of the labor and revolutionary movements, clandestine publications, leaflets, pamphlets, and other political ephemera encompassing previously unused collections from activists’ personal archives, the book offers a rich and detailed account of labor activism in 1950s Cuba. This activism, often undertaken at considerable risk to its protagonists, took multiple forms, from slowdowns, walkouts, and solidarity strikes to mass meetings