A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution. Stephen Cushion

found the need for a greater level of self-help. Insofar as the workers who organized this independent activity were politically affiliated, they tended to be associated either with the PSP, or else with the Auténticos and the Ortodoxos.³⁵ However, the behavior of Eusebio Mujal and his associates largely discredited the Auténticos, with whom he had previously been affiliated, and the death of Eddie Chibas deprived the Ortodoxos of much of their attraction, which was largely based around his charismatic leadership.³⁶ In any case, the Ortodoxos had little to offer workers faced with an employing class and a government concerned to increase profitability. Therefore, the tendencies previously associated with the reformist parties, or at least those who rejected the collaborationist policies of Mujal, were increasingly searching for a militant alternative. The newly formed Movimiento Revolucionario 26 de Julio (MR-26-7) would gain many of its first working-class members from the disillusioned ex-supporters of these reformist organizations, whose anti-communist political trajectory prevented them from seeing the PSP as a potential alternative. In order to understand the political development of these local activists, who were used to operating independently of the union bureaucracy, it may be useful to look at the earlier history of one particular group’s involvement in the Cuban class struggle.

      In 1924, the Havana leadership of the Hermandad Ferroviaria (Railway Brotherhood), the main railway trade union, refused to support the railway workers employed by the Ferrocarril del Norte de Cuba (North Cuba Railway) in Morón, members of an independent union who had walked out in solidarity with striking Camaqüey sugar workers. Nevertheless, despite the official attitude, the delegaciones³⁷ in Santiago and Guantánamo soon also walked out in support of their colleagues in Morón and put pressure on the national leadership to change its position. This incident is an example of the level of independence existing in the eastern end of the island where local loyalties were often stronger than formal affiliations to national organizations. Thus in 1943, by which time the CTC was under communist control and had signed a no-strike truce with the first Batista government for the duration of the war, the Guantánamo delegaciónes launched a strike in an attempt to enforce the payment of a 15 percent wage increase that had been decreed by the government, but from which they were excluded.³⁸ A strike during the Second World War was considered unpatriotic by the PSP, given their priority of maximum support for the Allied war effort following the German attack on the Soviet Union. They denounced the strikers’ leaders as “Trotskyites,” and for once this often misused accusation was true.³⁹

      In the 1930s, Cuban Trotskyism had its principal base in Guantánamo, where the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR, Revolutionary Workers’ Party)⁴⁰ was led by a railwayman, Antonio “Ñico” Torres Chedebaux.⁴¹ Torres was an experienced working-class militant who started his working life in the sugar industry in the Guantánamo region, but was victimized in 1931 for his involvement in a strike against the Machado dictatorship. In 1934 he joined the POR, along with Gustavo Fraga Jacomino, in time to participate in the party’s intervention in the peasant struggles at Realengo 18, in the mountains near Guantánamo.⁴² Unemployed and blacklisted for the remainder of the 1930s, Torres finally secured employment on the railway, and in 1942 was elected Secretario de Correspondencia by the members of Delegación 11, from which position he became one of the acknowledged leaders of the Guantánamo labor movement.⁴³ By the mid-1950s, he was part of a loose network of militants that operated very effectively in the Guantánamo region. This network would go on to play a significant role in the developing revolutionary resistance to Batista and would later provide the organizational framework and develop the tactics of the July 26 Movement, led by Fidel Castro.

      Statements made at the founding conference of the Cuban Communist Party indicate that when Fidel Castro and 135 others attacked the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953, it was with the intention of provoking an armed popular insurrection aimed at overthrowing the dictatorship.⁴⁴ A letter written by Castro to Luis Conte Agüero in December 1953 nuances this by suggesting the intention was to provoke a mutiny of army officers who were members of the Ortodoxo Party and that this would, it was hoped, provide a backbone to the popular uprising.⁴⁵ Whatever the attackers’ motivations, the action itself failed disastrously. However, the torture and murder of many of the attackers revolted a large number of ordinary Cubans and won a measure of sympathy for the young rebels. Castro himself was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but he was released in May 1955 following an amnesty campaign.⁴⁶ However, finding it impossible to operate in Cuba with his life under threat from agents of the regime, he left for Mexico on June 24.⁴⁷ He was still technically a member of the Ortodoxos and started organizing the MR-26-7 as a faction inside that party, issuing the first manifesto from Mexico on August 8, 1955.⁴⁸ This proposed a solution to the country’s problems based on agrarian reform, reestablishing workers’ rights, profit sharing in industry, rent reduction, social housing, the nationalization of foreign-owned utilities, the establishment of a social security system and measures for the state to aid industrialization. This was a radical program, but not one that crossed the bounds of economic nationalism, nor was it explicitly anti-imperialist.

      At the founding meeting of the MR-26-7 on June 12, 1955, it was agreed to set up a workers’ section, or sección obrera, to coordinate the movement’s activities among organized labor, national responsibility for which was given to a sugar worker from Camagüey, Luis Bonito.⁴⁹ Thereafter, every local group of the MR-26-7 that was formed appointed one or more of the leadership team to be responsible for setting up a local sección obrera. The process was uneven at first, with greater initial success in the east. The group of Guantánamo railway workers around Ñico Torres affiliated in September 1955, and the Santiago sección obrera was set up by a worker in the soft drinks industry, Ramón Alvarez Martínez, who, by the middle of November, persuaded the entire workers’ section of the local Ortodoxo Party to join the MR-26-7.⁵⁰ There were also early organizational moves in Matanzas Province around the textile workers’ leader, Julián Alemán.⁵¹ Small and uneven as the MR-26-7 sección obrera was, it had an initial membership with sufficient experience and contacts to be able to recruit from the series of strikes that would break out in 1955. This expansion would force the MR-26-7 to consider its relationship with the PSP, with which it would find itself in competition for influence among the militant working class.

       Communism

      The Cuban Communist Party was founded in 1925. In common with the other official Communist parties in Latin America, it supported a stage-by-stage approach to politics that required the establishment of a “Bourgeois-Democratic” regime before a start could be made on the road to socialism.⁵² During the early 1930s, the Cuban Communists attempted a sectarian implementation of this policy and refused to work with other organizations that opposed the Machado dictatorship.⁵³ Nevertheless, the party increased its influence and membership by its support for workers in the sugar industry from 1930 to 1933 and thereafter played an important role in the Cuban trade union movement.⁵⁴ But the party leadership was taken by surprise when, in 1933, a stoppage by Havana bus drivers turned into a revolutionary general strike. The party tried to settle the dispute in return for concessions from the government, but when the strike continued despite these attempts at compromise and successfully brought down the Machado government, the party sacrificed much of its credibility.

      After the Nazi victory in Germany, the Communist International (Comintern) became increasingly concerned by the growth of fascism and changed course, adopting the policy of calling for popular fronts, or alliances between the working class and progressive elements in the bourgeoisie. Communist parties began to speak in terms of national unity against fascism and imperialism, and minimizing the significance of the class struggle.⁵⁵ This tendency was exacerbated in Cuba as a result of the influence of the leader of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA), Earl Browder, who, in December 1943, argued that all social problems could be solved through peaceful compromise. This approach, which became known as Browderism, argued that capitalism and communism could march hand-in-hand to a future of peaceful collaboration.⁵⁶ This provided theoretical justification for the particular interpretation of the popular front policy that was adopted in Cuba, which resulted in an alliance with General Batista during his first government in the 1940s. Memory of this alliance would further reduce