A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution. Stephen Cushion

of the ports were also owned by the railway companies and dockers in Boquerón and Nuevitas struck in support of their railway colleagues, as a result of which 58,000 sacks of sugar lay idle on the dock.³⁵ Other port workers in Matanzas, Caimanera, and Manzanillo took advantage of the opportunity to publicly demonstrate both in support of the railway workers and to express their own opposition to bulk loading of sugar.³⁶ It should be remembered that the port workers had a very good practical reason for their solidarity as they recognized that they might need railway support later in their battle to reject a series of productivity measures with which their own industry was threatened. The most public demonstrations of solidarity took place in Camagüey where the CTC Federación Provincial (Provincial Federation) discussed the possibility of a general strike, while many workers independently took part in ten-minute solidarity strikes. All this activity resulted in numerous arrests, in response to which the women of Camagüey organized a demonstration demanding the release of all prisoners.³⁷

      With the zafra (sugar harvest) having only just started, following some difficult negotiations that had left many sugar workers deeply unhappy, Batista was concerned not to provide a pole of resistance that might have inspired disgruntled sugar workers in a movement that could have escaped the control of the trade union bureaucracy. The government therefore decreed another truce on February 8 while the Tribunal de Cuentas, the government accountancy service, investigated the situation of the company, this time for one hundred days. This new truce was funded with another 700,000 pesos.³⁸ The official union comité conjunto (joint committee), which had been set up by the CTC to oversee the action, ordered a return to work without consulting mass meetings in the depots. In Guantánamo, Delegación 11, the local organization of the Hermandad Ferroviaria covering the membership who worked for FFCC Consolidados, denounced the truce as a sell-out and continued the strike until the 11th, when, following Mujal’s personal intervention, they were paid in cash, thereby overcoming the company’s attempt to pay 70 percent in cash and the rest in scrip until the government subsidy arrived.³⁹ The line from Caibarien to Morón was reportedly still not working normally on February 17.⁴⁰ A special congress of the Federación Nacional Ferroviaria (the national federation of railway unions, including the Hermandad Ferroviaria and unions of office workers) was called to ratify the actions of the officials and, given that most of the delegations had not been elected by assemblies of the workers, such ratification was granted, although only after considerable bureaucratic manipulation from the chair.⁴¹ Once assured that the official trade union machinery was back in control and further unofficial action was unlikely, the regime moved against some of the militants, with the Santa Clara courts condemning eighteen bus drivers and seventy-two railwaymen for huelga ilícita (illegal strike action).⁴²

      Following the end of the sugar harvest, the report of Tribunal de Cuentas recommended an 8 percent wage cut, forced retirements, scrapping the collective agreement, abolishing many bonuses, and lengthening the working day, as well as extensive service cuts.⁴³ Batista accepted the report and published decree number 1535 on June 7, the so-called “Laudo Ferroviario” (railway arbitration decision), which implemented the recommended measures and gave the company an annual subsidy of 600,000 pesos.⁴⁴ Within forty-eight hours Guantánamo was again out on strike, quickly followed by Camagüey and Santiago, 10,000 workers in all.⁴⁵ Now that the sugar harvest was safely gathered in, the full force of the state was moved against the workers, the army was mobilized, the Ministry of Labor denied the very existence of the strike, and the CTC leadership condemned it out of hand. The strikers replied by organizing ciudades-muertas or “dead towns” across the region, completely shutting down Camagüey, Guantánamo, Morón, Nuevitas, and Santiago. The tactic of ciudad-muerta was a form of civic general strike in which not only did the other workers in a town strike in sympathy but most business and commerce also closed their doors. The bus workers in Santiago who worked in companies owned by the FFCC Consolidados also walked out again and, on May 9, set up camp on the town hall patio in protest.⁴⁶ The CTC, realizing that the action was escaping its control, sent a committee to mediate but still failed to authorize the strike, although claiming to understand the grievance. Javier Balaños, leader of the Federación Nacional Ferroviaria, met the directors of FFCC Consolidados while appealing to the president to suspend the laudo for thirty days. Batista refused to meet union representatives as the police, army, and secret policemen started routing drivers and signalmen out of their houses and forcing them back to work at gunpoint.

      We have already seen the importance of the women from the offices in launching the strike and that the solidarity actions of family members were of significance. Given that the army was rounding up train-operating and signaling staff, forcing them to work at gunpoint, it was difficult for these workers to publicly demonstrate and picket. In a pattern that was repeated in other industrial disputes of the time, this public role was often taken over by women, either railway office workers or the families of the strikers, who also played a leading role in setting up neighborhood solidarity committees. Though women made up only 10 percent of the Cuban workforce and many of them were in the notoriously difficult organizational territory of domestic service, the comparatively few trade-unionized women workers in the Cuba of the 1950s played a vital role in initiating and sustaining militant action out of all proportion to their numbers.