The United States had never been part of the international sugar market, having sufficient supplies from its own internal sources and client states such as Cuba and the Philippines. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Cuba supplied almost the entire U.S. market and then sold any excess on the world market, but the Jones-Costigan Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in May 1934, imposed a system of quotas that were not mutually negotiated but decided unilaterally by the U.S. secretary of agriculture.37 This reduced the Cuban share of the U.S. market from 50 percent to 30 percent, and by the early 1950s the United States was buying only about half of the Cuban sugar crop. The U.S. quota system was further complicated by the fact that besides its commercial function it had a political dimension.38 So, in May 1955, following an aggressive campaign led by Senator Allan Elender, the U.S. Senate passed a new “Sugar Law” that reduced Cuba’s previously held right to 96 percent of any increase in U.S. consumption to 29.5 percent. This, according to Oscar Pino-Santos writing at the time, cost Cuba nearly 100,000 tons.39 This additional threat to Cuban sugar production, which occurred despite a visit to Washington by a united delegation of Cuban employers and workers’ leaders of all factions, served to increase anti-imperialist feeling among sugar workers.40
These feelings reinforced working-class nationalist politics and gave added credence to ideas of economic nationalism as a solution to poverty and insecurity. This in turn further undermined the credibility of the London Sugar Agreement, which was popularly seen as being a surrender to foreign interests.41 It has been common since the 1960s to assume that opposition to foreign ownership was directed entirely against the United States. However, it should be remembered that European capital held a significant minority stake in the Cuban economy, and this was just as bitterly resented when it appeared to threaten the perceived Cuban national interest.
As the failure of the London Sugar Agreement to prevent the continuing decline in sugar prices was becoming increasingly obvious, the Cuban government’s inability to think of an alternative strategy further reduced its standing. Peru and Indonesia had refused to join; Brazil and Formosa were unsatisfied with their quota and left; and many importers were never included. Moreover, the British Commonwealth received privileges that, given that London was the home of the agreement, served to further weaken the agreement’s credibility. By early 1955, the price of sugar was 3.15 cents a pound, 10 points lower than the agreed minimum. Cuba appeared to be taking the majority of the restriction with a 30 percent reduction compared to the production levels of 1952, although the impact of that would be much worse if the U.S. quota were to be cut further, as now seemed likely. The London Sugar Agreement appears from these figures to be working against Cuba’s interests, but remaining a party to the agreement maintained a level of profitability for the employers, even if this was at the expense of working-class employment and living standards. But living standards for agricultural workers were already appalling.42 The figures contained in the 1957 report by a Cuban Jesuit association, the Agrupación Católica Universitaria, are graphic: 64 percent of rural dwellers with no proper sanitation, 43 percent illiterate, 91 percent undernourished—to give but a few examples.43 Cuba’s sugar workers therefore had little to lose by resisting, and though hardship does not necessarily generate militancy, when combined with a sense of injustice there is potential for industrial action.
These problems had already been foreseen by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) in 1951 when, following the request of the Cuban government for a loan, an American economist, Francis Truslow, was commissioned to produce a report on the state of the Cuban economy.
Productivity and Politics
The Truslow Report started from the position that international competition gave rise to the need to reduce sugar production costs and the recognition that mechanization must inevitably displace some labor. The problem was summed up as:
• employees strongly resist mechanization and cost-cutting methods;
• the discharge of employees for legitimate cause [is] made difficult or impossible;
• higher wages, coupled with opposition to methods for increasing productivity, endanger the competitive position of the basic sugar industry itself.44
The opposition to productivity measures was rooted in the island’s high levels of unemployment and underemployment, which explains the tenacity shown by Cuban workers in defending their jobs and the social clauses in the Cuban constitution that helped them to do so. The report recognizes that the high level of unemployment deeply affected the consciousness of those in work; job security was always an important concern of unionized workers.45 Truslow sums up the situation as follows: “In Cuba it is usually easier, quicker and cheaper to divorce a wife than to fire a worker. Under prevailing conditions of chronic seasonal unemployment, it may also be easier to find a new wife than to find a new job.”46
The report argued that increased productivity would attract investment, promote diversification, and thereby produce jobs, although it does recognize that the workers’ reluctance to cooperate was based on their doubt that the money saved would be invested productively.47 Underneath the call for greater cooperation between management and labor lay the concrete proposal to make dismissal of employees simpler, faster, and cheaper.48 In the particular case of the sugar industry, the report called for mechanization, not of the planting and cultivating, but of the harvesting, which was the most labor-intensive part of production and would result in the redundancy of a very large number of workers.49 The employers wished to extend the mechanization of the sugar industry beyond that recommended by Truslow to include modernization of the refining process in order to process the cane faster. This would not only save time and thereby reduce wages in the sugar refineries, it would also put pressure on the independent cane farmers, the colonos, to increase the pace of work of their harvesting crews to supply the same amount of cane in a shorter time. The sugar workers called this process intensivismo, replying with the demand that they be paid for superproducción; this expression meant that they wished to be paid the same total amount as they had been before the new machinery arrived.50 Clearly this was not what the employers had in mind when they considered investing in new machinery.51
The Truslow Report was not merely concerned with the production of sugar, but also examined transport, which was an equally important part of the export procedure. The railway industry was close to bankruptcy and port labor was considered to be in need of reform to reduce its potential to disrupt loading. The report bemoans “the strategic position occupied by men who load and unload ships, in view of the big investment tied up in ships and merchandise, and the ease with which shipping companies can be subjected to important losses by sudden stoppages or delays.”52
This “strategic position” has been used by dockers everywhere to enhance their wages, improve their working conditions, and maintain their manning levels. However, most employers would agree with Truslow in feeling that this obliged them to employ more workers than was strictly necessary, thereby reducing business efficiency. In particular, the report identified the main problem as the refusal to bulk-load sugar. The universal nature of maritime productivity disputes is underlined by the contacts established at this time between the dockworkers of Caibarién in northern Cuba, who were fighting bulk-loading and the workers in the port of Liverpool in England, who