Chapter 5 examines working-class responses to the government’s increased use of arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearances and death squads. This campaign of state terror affected both the July 26th Movement and the communists. The political and organizational response of both organizations is outlined and analyzed, with particular emphasis on the way in which local activists interpreted their own group’s line, and how this new situation affected their relationship.
Chapter 6 subsequently examines two general strikes, August 1957 and April 1958, the first a success, the second a failure. It analyzes the reasons for the different outcomes and shows how these outcomes affected the politics of the PSP and MR-26-7. These two strikes are reassessed in the light of the process of convergence between the two groups.
Chapter 7 continues this theme of convergence and traces its organizational form. In particular it gives details of workers’ congresses in territory under the control of the rebel forces. These two congresses show the true level of working-class organization in support of the revolution and refute the arguments of those who say that such support was merely passive. In the process, it becomes clear that the trade union bureaucracy was marginalized by the activity of the rebel army and by grassroots trade union activists.
A revolution does not succeed with the seizure of power, but with its consolidation. In the first year of the new Cuba, organized labor played an important role in that process of consolidation and in the final triumph of the more radical wing of the revolutionary forces. Chapter 8 therefore returns to the theme of trade union bureaucracy, as the disputes within the rebel leadership on the future course of the revolution are fought inside the trade union federation.
A concluding section draws together the main themes of the book and answers the question of what exactly the role was of the organized working class in the Cuban insurrection of the 1950s.
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Kate Quinn and Jean Stubbs for their help, support, encouragement, and constructive engagement. I am also extremely grateful to Angelina Rojas and Jorge Ibarra Guitart of the Instituto de Historia de Cuba, my mentors in Cuba and the source of much encouragement and advice. I also acknowledge the generous help of Alcibíades Poveda Díaz, Alejandra Lopez, Alejandra Serpente, Alex Ostmann, Alfredo Menéndez, Barry Carr, Beatriz Rajland, Belkis Quesada, Bill Booth, Brian Pollitt, Camillia Cowling, Carrie Gibson, Clem Seecharan, Colin Lewis, Daniel Kersffeld, Delio Orozco and the staff of the Manzanillo Archives, Fernando Carcases and the staff of the Library of the University of Oriente, Dylan Vernon, Emily Morris, Erin Clermont, Felipe Pérez, Francis Velázquez Fuentes, Francisco Monserrat Iser, Gary Tennant, Gloria García, Hal Klepak, Ian Birchall, Inés Enoa Castillo, James Dunkerley, Jana Lipman, Jerry Hagelberg, Jon Curry-Machado, Jorge Giovanetti, Jorge Ibarra Cuesta, José Puello Socarrás, José Sanchez Guerra and the staff of the Guantánamo provincial archive, Juan Carlos Gomez, Juan Venegas, Julio Garcia, Liz Dore, Ken Fuller, Kevin Middlebrook, Kristine Hatzky, Leonie Jordan, Luis Figures, Luis Suarez, Maily Acosta and the staff of the Archivo Historico Provincial de Las Villas, Maku Veloz, Mandy Banton, Margarita Canseco, María Celia Cotarelo, María Victoria Antúnez Salto, Maritza Mendez and the staff of the IHC archives, Martin Paddio, Mary Turner, Maxine Molyneux, Michael Yates, Mildred de la Torre Molina, Murray Glickman, Natividad Alfaro, Nicolás Iñigo Carrera, Olivia Saunders, Oscar Zanetti, Paulo Drinot, Pedro Machado, Philip Mansfield, Rafael Duharte and the staff of the Oficina del Historiador de Santago de Cuba, Reinaldo Suárez, Robert Whitney, Robin Blackburn, Servando Valdés Sánchez, Silvia Blanca-Nogales, Shirley Pemberton, Sue Thomas, Tony Kapcia, Vicente Perez, and Victor Bulmer-Thomas.
Without their help, this study would not have materialized. The responsibility for amassing and interpreting the material, however, lies with me.
1. ORGANIZED LABOR IN THE 1950s
In the early 1950s, the Cuban trade union federation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC, Cuban Workers’ Confederation), headed by General Secretary Eusebio Mujal, was widely seen as corrupt and undemocratic. It had not always been like this, but the Cold War attack on organized labor, which affected the whole of the Americas, north and south, was particularly successful in Cuba. Following the 1947 CTC Congress, the communists had been removed from their previous position of leadership and replaced by a new bureaucracy that seemed more interested in enhancing their own comfortable existence than in defending workers’ wages and conditions. However, the actions of the trade union leadership cannot be explained solely by corrupt practices but must be understood in relation to analysis of their politics, which prevented them from seeing beyond the parameters set by the capitalist system. In the difficult economic circumstances facing postwar Cuba, the CTC leadership was prepared to restrict the demands they put forward on behalf of their members to the employers’ “ability to pay.” But though the leadership accepted that trade union demands had to be “affordable” and “realistic,” growing numbers of Cuban workers did not see it that way. This resulted in tensions within the unions between the rank and file and the bureaucracy, which led militant Cuban workers to build unofficial structures in order to defend their interests.1
Nevertheless, trade unions are never monolithic, relying on voluntary officials such as shop stewards and branch secretaries to maintain local organization. There is therefore nearly always a space in which militants can organize to counteract the domination of the bureaucracy. During the crisis in which Cuba found itself during the 1950s, there was still a lively independent milieu within the labor movement at the local level, where the authority of the CTC bureaucracy was contested and became a battleground between the various currents competing for influence within the working class.
Historical Background
The organized labor movement in Cuba dates back to the guilds and craft unions of the nineteenth century, but the first nationwide trade union federation, the Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba (CNOC, Cuban National Labor Confederation), was not founded until 1925. In the same year, Gerardo Machado was democratically elected president, but his regime became increasingly repressive as the effects of the economic crisis of the late 1920s raised the temperature of the class struggle. Cuba’s sugar-based economy was already suffering from reductions in U.S. purchases as a result of political pressure from mainland producers, with the result that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had a particularly devastating effect on the island.2
The situation came to a head in 1933 when a strike by Havana bus drivers developed into a general strike that, in conjunction with a rebellion by students and an army mutiny led by Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, brought down the government. It is worth noting that the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), which had progressively gained control of the CNOC toward the end of the 1920s, tried unsuccessfully to call off the strike in return for minor concessions from the Machado government, and this may be seen as confirmation of the politically moderating effect of having control of a trade union apparatus. The government of Ramón Grau San Martín, which took office after the uprising, proved to be neither capable of satisfying the aspirations of the workers nor being able to bring them under control. The state of dual power that resulted from this contradiction was brought to a close by Batista, who, working closely with the U.S. ambassador, used his control of the army to defeat a general strike in 1935. Initially ruling through puppet presidents, Batista imposed a regime that has been described as both co-optive and repressive, a model that operated by combining a mixture of nationalist demagogy and minor social reforms with repression of any attempt by workers to exceed the boundaries established by the government.3
The CNOC did not recover from