Post on 22-Feb-2015
History Research Paper/Internal Assessment 2011Theme: Nationalism and Nation Building
‘Misguided or Consistent, Wrong or Right‘. Cuba’s Socialist Transformation up to 1970 was a justified revolution for the Masses of the society.
Candidate Number: Centre Number:Andrew Lindsay4/1/2011
1
Acknowledgements
While responsibility for the completion of this project is entirely my own,
there is need to acknowledge gratitude to the following who helped to
provide the information that was necessary for the preparation of this
assignment. I am grateful to my father Louis Lindsay and my mother Sandra
Johnson, whose understanding and hospitality I cherish. I thank my father
who has provided me access to the resources of his personal library, from
which I had a variety of books and articles to choose for the completion of
this project. Last but definitely not least, I owe considerable gratitude to my
mother, Sandra as it was most from her computer and house countless
hours of research and typing was done.
2
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgements.........................................................................................1
Table of Contents............................................................................................2
Area of Research.............................................................................................3
Rationale/Aim..................................................................................................4
Introduction.....................................................................................................5
3
ThemeNationalism and Nation-building more specifically Cuba’s Socialist transformation up to 1970
Module 3: Freedom in Action
Theme 2: Nationalism and Nation-building
o B)Cuba’s Socialist transformation up to 1970
4
Hypothesis
‘Misguided or Consistent, Wrong or Right‘. Cuba’s Socialist Transformation
up to 1970 was a justified revolution for the Masses of the society.
5
Introduction
The topic of Nationalism and Nation Building especially regarding
Cuba interested me due to my father’s specialisation in the field of Political
science and government and my overall desire to discover for myself
whether or not of Cuba’s infamy today is in fact justified.
The nature of the revolution itself, in this research will be analysed
using a variety of primary and secondary sources from Cuban historians
such as Ramon Eduardo Ruiz and from leaders as influential Fidel Castro
himself. The information obtained will be then examined in order to derive if
the revolution was indeed justified in origin.
El República de Cuba as the nation of Cuba is properly known was not
the rigid, confined and nationalised state it has become in recent times.
Cuba was once one of the most powerful economic powers in the Latin
American and Caribbean Region due to its loose trade regulations and
relative ease in which investors could capitalise on profits in the. This all
changed however in 1959 at the end of the Cuban Revolution.
By almost popular consensus at the time, Cuban nationals did not
want to live in a society with gross economic wealth at the cost of their
independence, and so the transition towards Socialism began and with that
change came great disturbances within the region, emanating from this
small island, reverberating into the wider world.
6
The witlessness and misapprehension of many nations have in large
part facilitated the socialist revolution in Cuba. Britain, Spain, the U.S. and
the Soviet Bloc have at various stages in the country’s history, played the
island like a pawn in their game of bolstering power internationally and
have tried to influence its internal developments. This can be observed
through the upheavals in the conspiracies of the Ten Years War (1868-78),
The War for Liberation in 1895 and the social revolutions in 1933 and 1959.
Therefore it is no surprise to many that the island nation underwent a
powerful, large scale societal shift that changed the very nature of
intellectual thought in the state’s people.
7
Background, Nature and Impacts of Cuba’s Socialist Transition
Fidel Castro, the leader of the revolutionary forces that were at the
ending of the 1950’s, Prime Minister of the Revolutionary Government and
the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba was not a Marxist
initially. Castro as a matter of fact was not a member of any communist
groups and was only briefly introduced with Marxist-Leninism at best as a
young revolutionary, this changed greatly with time. He was a member of
the Ortodoxos or The People’s Cuban Party which greatly opposed
communism and its tenets.1 So why did Castro so firmly change his
ideological stance when coming into power?
The development of the movement is closely related to the history and
nature of Cuban society as a whole as well as the local economy.
Unemployment, economic crises, a fragmented, stagnant electoral system,
1 Grupo de Propaganda Doctrinal Ortodoxa, Doctrina del Partido Ortodoxo (Havana: P. Fernandez y Cia., 1951), pp. 3, 62.
8
public corruption – all influenced the rise of Marxism in Cuba at the time
and possibly could have played a part in Castro’s capitalist departure.
Political stagnation and later on dissatisfaction with the political scene on
the island was a very important factor which played in the rise of Marxism.
The three major parties in control at the time the Democrats, Liberals &
Republicans battled for supremacy in Cuba. All were conservative and all
were representative of a powerful oligarchy. Ruiz states that ‘their
programs eulogized private enterprise …[and] when the chips were down
preferred dictatorship to chaos and disorder’.2 There were Reform Parties
however such as the Autenticos, which when led by Grau in 1944 won the
elections. They started to follow the status quo soon after and out of
frustration the ‘true’ reformers left and formed the Ortodoxos.
Any observer can see by the start of Batista’s regime in 1952 the
electoral system was in a state of shambles. Ruiz continues:
“Party goals were the spoils of office and the public Treasury, for the
distribution among party hacks and leaders. The parties functioned in a
world of their own, independent of public demands and aspirations,
where loyalty to the party, its members and its leadership, dictated
decisions”
It was clear at this stage in Cuba’s history democracy was no longer
legitimate. J. Lanuza states ‘No one more resembled a conservative than a
2 H. Beckles & V. Sheperd, Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emacipation to Present (Kingston, Ian Randle Publishers, 1993), pp 534
9
liberal’. Politics became almost a personalist enterprise where if the party
leader was supported enjoyed popular stature and if not enjoyed political
favours from the man climbing the ladder up or jefe poltico. It was the
advent of the caudillo or political boss the rise of the Machados, Batistas
and Graus3. The illegitimacy of Cuba’s ‘old’ politics facilitated a desire for
newer more radical systems of political thought – Marxism became sought
more as the change needed to purify the islands policy.
Economically being invested in sugar was not always bad for Cuba. After
the War for Liberation in 1896 there was a fast upward rise in sugar’s
development for the U.S. market. Cubans’ living conditions were not low
compared to international standards. In 1925 per capita income averaged
over US $200 in current prices, according to tentative estimates – more
than 35 percent of US per capita income at the time. A shortfall soon
occurred however; the purchasing power of Cuban exports in 1956 was no
more than it had been thirty years ago. Historians and Economists such as
Dudley Seers blame it on a single cause – unemployment. There was a
failure in the removal of large scale unemployment after the depression
between 1956 – 57; unemployment averaged 16 per cent4.
An important tenet of Utopian Socialism is the distribution of resources
equally to all classes5. In the case of Cuba under that system enough
3 H. Beckles & V. Sheperd, Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emacipation to Present (Kingston, Ian Randle Publishers, 1993), pp 5344 D. Seers, The Economic and Social Revolution (North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 6-9, 11-13, 17-19.5 Utopian Socialism, from Wikipedia the Online Encyclopaedia retrieved on March 13, 2011http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism
10
resources would be expropriated to the poor to give them work causing in
the long term economic growth, solving both the labour and the economic
problems. Many came to believe that Socialism would become the short and
long term answer to these inconveniences.
Economic challenges were not the only ones faced by citizens of Cuba
before the revolution in 1959; societal ones were faced and were perhaps
the most detrimental in the nation’s development. Illiteracy, after
decreasing to its lowest levels in the1920’s failed to decline any further. It
was to such a state that the proportion of school children in the 1950’s was
lower than those in the 1920’s.6 A third of the nation lived in poverty. Seers
describes them ‘living in huts, without electricity and toilet facilities,
suffering from parasitic diseases and lacking access to health services,
denied education (their children received first grade education, if
that)’.Taking the urban and rural populations, 62 percent of them had
incomes less than US$75 a month, less than one-fourth of the average per
capita income.7
The built up desire for change was regulated by the repression of the
political opposition, which was great. Stability could hardly be expected in a
country with such societal divides and in the case where people were short
6 D. Seers, The Economic and Social Revolution (North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 6-9, 11-13, 17-19.
7 D. Seers, The Economic and Social Revolution (North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 6-9, 11-13, 17-19.
11
food and money – such state of affairs could not continue. The stage for
revolution was set.
Fidel realised that the revolution for national independence he planned
could not be separate from a social one – meaning that his deep rooted anti-
imperialist regime had to simultaneously be a socialist one. In a television
appearance in 1961 he said:
“We had to make the anti-imperialist, socialist revolution…the anti-
imperialist, socialist revolution could only be one, one single revolution,
because there is only one revolution. That is the great dialectal truth of
humanity, of imperialism and standing against it, socialism”8
It would be easy to therefore conclude that Castro desired the transition
into Socialism to implement reforms to the problems stated earlier, but to
do so would be naïve and incomplete assessment. The Cuban historian
Ramon Eduardo Ruiz has four suggestions which illustrate the causes for
Castro’s fierce transition into Marxist-Leninism and eventually into
communism. Firstly his immense fear of the U.S. and their foreign policy
tactics in the Latin Americas, secondly his need for popular support from
the masses after the revolution, the belief that Socialism could solve their
socio-economic problems and finally the forced isolation of Cuba into the
Soviet Bloc9.
8 Castro, La revolution cubana, pp. 438-39. On this issue see “Caracter proletaria y socialista de la revolucion cubana”9 R. Ruiz, Cuba: The Making of A Revolution (New York, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1970), pp. 116.
12
The fear of the US is an understandable reason for Castro to change
ideologies. The Cold War was well under way in the late 1950’s and in order
to protect himself from US intervention explains the appeal of Marxist-
Leninism to Castro. Ruiz supports this view stating that it illustrates Castro
metamorphosis from a ‘humanist reformer to a Communist’10. This move
served to protect Cuba if for example the US intervened in Cuba using the
Platt Amendment, Cuba would have the Soviets’ support in order to protect
Cuba against this invasion.
Marxism was made into a unifying force by Fidel during the revolution to
as well as to increase his troop numbers. Castro states during a letter to
Luis Conte Aguero that:
“The task of uniting all of our combatants must come first because it
would be a shame that the lack of basic motivation was to lead to serious
losses in our ranks…perhaps the most difficult and time consuming task
is to find people of quality and prepare them so that their initial
participation will be decisive. Starting with the people that we now have,
we can greatly multiply our forces, that is, forces that are prepared to
join other similar forces in disciplined fashion in order to build the
necessary momemtum to defeat the existing political system. 11”
Marxists traditionally used socialism to attract the poor and disenfranchised
to their movements. Afro-Cubans usually took kindly to its principles since
10 R. Ruiz, Cuba: The Making of A Revolution (New York, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1970), pp. 116.11 Fidel Castro, August 14, 1954, letter to Luis Conte Aguero in Cartas del Presido, pp. 60-61.
13
they were shunned by the whites and refused equality. Communists made
thousands of converts among the Afro-Cubans, for example Lazaro Pena
who became the biggest labour boss in Cuba’s history. By the end of 1961
the Commitees for the defence of the Revolution already had one million
members. In the early 1970’s over half the county’s adult population
belonged to this committee12. It was clear Castro had popular support using
ideology.
The third reason given by Ruiz explaining Castro’s shift to socialism is
under dispute by some but involves the amelioration of many of the social
and economic problems before the revolution. To solve the economic and
social crises the Castro government gradually expropriated all foreign-
owned private assets and pumping those resources into infrastructural
programs such as hospitals and schools. By the early 1960’s Jorge
Dominiguez states that:
“Virtually all Cuban Industry, foreign trade, wholesale, internal trade,
banking, education, and health had all been nationalised. In 1963 the
second agrarian reform act raised the government’s ownership share of
all land to 70 percent; its share of land actually under cultivation was 57
percent…[by] 1968 all small businesses, retail trade, artisan shops and
petty service shops were nationalised”13
12 H. Defosses & J. Levesque, Socialism in the Third World (New York, Praeger Publishers), pp. 3913 H. Defosses & J. Levesque, Socialism in the Third World (New York, Praeger Publishers), pp. 40
14
Along with land reform, one of the primary areas that Minister of industries,
Che Guevara stressed needed national improvement was in the area
of literacy. Before 1959 the official literacy rate for Cuba was between 60-
76 %, with educational access improved in rural areas and a presence of
instructors were the main factors which facilitated at end of the literacy
campaign an increase to 96%.14.
The final factor as explained by Ruiz is isolation from the West directed
towards Cuba. The US Embargo of 1960 implemented as retaliation for the
nationalization attempts in the island played the hidden and perhaps
unwanted role of pushing Castro into the communist camp. Castro needed
materials and money to both keep himself safely in power as well as for his
infrastructural reforms. Soviet assistance was critical if the rest of the world
decided not to help. He had no choice – this perhaps could have been the
main factor at play.
Overall however the nationalization schemes implemented from the
agrarian reforms were not successful economically after the initial phase of
wealth redistribution as they were poorly suited to Cuban conditions.15 The
same conditions of Political stagnancy were rampant, even more so at the
end of the end of revolution. Dominiguez states:
When the revolutionary government came into power in January 1959,
the political parties were suspended pending national elections (which
14 D. Kellner, Critical Theory Marxism and Modernity (Maryland, Johs Hopkins University Press), pp.6115 S. Craig, Contemporary Caribbean: A Sociological Reader (Maracas, Susan Craig), pp. 246
15
have not been held). The leadership around Castro deemphasized the role
of revolutionary organisations such as the 26th of July Movement …
because they were subject to being influenced by other leaders…at the
same time they took over autonomous organisations of producers and
professionals”16
The societal reforms though were successful as observed earlier on in this
work, but was this achievement significant enough to call the revolution
successful, hence justifying it?
16 H. Defosses & J. Levesque, Socialism in the Third World (New York, Praeger Publishers), pp. 38
16
Conclusion
The question of whether or not Cuba’s transition into a Marxist-
Leninist state before 1970 was a justified revolution cannot be simply
answered by assessing benefits of the revolution. One has to critically
examine if the revolution truly solved the major problems facing the citizens
of the island: the economic crises, splintered society, stagnant electoral
system and public corruption; or if it merely served Castro’s need for
protection against US intervention and gaining popular support in Cuba.
Essentially if the revolution was more successful at a greater degree in the
former one could state that the revolution was justified as it strived to help
the people of Cuba directly more than the ruling system. If not the
revolution would be pointless as it strayed from its original intentions of
helping the poor and disenfranchised.
Now on the analysis of the research paper presented one observes a
sharp distinction when it comes to the successes of the transition. It is
noted that only true success of the revolution in terms of ameliorating the
problems prior to the revolution occurred in social and infrastructural
reform for example in the literacy campaigns. Economic and Political reform
failed. However, in regards to factors Ruiz stated which facilitated Castro’s
ideological change into Marxism (the factors above) all were implemented
for the benefit of the regime. This gap in the advantages for the masses
17
relative to those of the regime forces me to therefore conclude that the
Socialist revolution, in fact was not justified.