Cuba Libre A 500 Year Quest For Independence 0742566706 9780742566705 PDF

Cuba Libre
A 500-Year Quest
for Independence
Philip Brenner and Peter Eisner
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Names: Brenner, Philip, author. | Eisner, Peter, author.
Title: Cuba libre : a 500-year quest for independence / Philip Brenner and Peter Eisner.
Other titles: Cuba libre, a 500-year quest for independence
Description: Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, [2018] | Includes bibliographical
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Subjects: LCSH: Cuba—History—1895– | National liberation movements—Cuba—
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Contents
Preface vi
PART I: 1492–1958

1 Columbus Arrives and Spain Colonizes Cuba, 1492–1550 2
2 Sugar and Slavery 12
3 Struggle for Independence, 1868–1898 23
4 Cuban Independence War and US Occupation 32
5 From Occupation to “Good Neighbor” 40
6 Playground of the Western World and the Rise of Batista,
1934–1958 56
7 The Revolutionary Struggle, 1953–1958 68
PART II: 1959–1989

8 The Quest for Sovereignty 81
9 Consolidating the Revolution: Culture and Politics 96
10 C
onsolidating the Revolution: Economic Reforms,
New Institutions, and Basic Needs 111
11 Bay of Pigs/Playa Girón 128
12 The Missile Crisis 142
13 F
oreign Policy in the 1960s: Exporting Revolution,
Chinese Flirtations, and Soviet Tensions 157
iii
iv Contents
14 Internal Adjustments and Advancing Equality, 1963–1975 170

15 Becoming a Third World Leader, 1970s 188
16 Mariel Exodus—A Warning Signal, 1980 201
17 Change and Rectification at Home and Abroad, 1980s 208
PART III: 1990–2016

18 The “Special Period” in a Time of Peace, 1990–2000 225
19 The Cuban Diaspora and Racial Inequality 242
20 Helms-Burton, US-Cuban Relations, and Terrorism, 1995–1998 253
21 The Pope Goes to Cuba; Elián Goes to Miami, 1998–2000 263
22 The Search for a Viable Strategy, 2001–2006 272
23 The Transition from Fidel to Raúl Castro, 2006–2009 293
24 S
ecuring Cuba’s Independence through Economic Change,
2010–2016 307
25 S
ecuring Cuba’s Independence through Foreign Policy,
2010–2016 324
26 Change, Continuity, and the Future 336
Appendix: Chronology of Key Events 355

Bibliography 380
Index 414
Preface
The tocororo, or trogon in English, is Cuba’s national bird. Cubans com-

monly account for the country’s selection of this beautiful tropical species
by noting that its red, white, and blue feathers are the same colors as Cuba’s
flag (see photo on back cover). A second explanation is that a tocororo cannot
survive in captivity and will die if caged. Thus, the tocororo reflects Cuba’s
national character, Cuba libre, a people who demand to be free.
While their pursuit of freedom has been evident for five hundred years,
Cubans began to articulate the goal in terms of nationhood during the nine-
teenth century. Independence leaders believed that with national sovereignty,
Cubans “collectively could do something about the forces that governed
their lives,” in the words of historian Louis A. Pérez Jr., whose research and
sensibilities have informed much of this book. “Nation promised agency and
autonomy—for Cubans to be responsible only to themselves.”1
The vision of a sovereign and independent nationhood animated the
revolutionaries who overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on
January 1, 1959, and it has been their source of inspiration since then. To
be sure, Cuba’s decisions in the last sixty years—the period on which this
book focuses the most attention—were not always consistent with the vi-
sion. Its defense from US attacks and sanctions, and its relationship with
the Soviet Union from 1960 to 1991, reduced options available to Cuba’s
leaders. When the Soviet relationship ended, compromises dictated by the
need to find new markets and sources of income seemed to move the coun-
try further off a course aimed at the vision. Yet the leaders’ determination
to maintain as much independence for Cuba as possible often led them to
make choices that seemed to defy conventional economic wisdom. Today,
too, as the country lurches through a process of “updating” its political and
vi
Preface vii
economic organization, independence and sovereignty remain core goals

that Cuba’s leaders are most concerned about relinquishing.
Importantly, Cuba’s leaders are not the only ones to hold this aspiration.
When a gravely ill Fidel Castro handed his conductor’s baton to Raúl Castro
in 2006, there was none of the turmoil or chaos that many US policymakers
and Cuban exiles had anticipated. The revolutionary regime did not collapse.
While Fidel was the indispensable person without whom the Cuban Revolu-
tion would have taken a different course, it also had an organic quality based
on an implicit social contract between leaders and followers. The broad mass
of Cubans had acquired a personal dignity that they associated with the Revo-
lution’s pursuit of national independence.
In emphasizing the importance that Cubans attach to freedom and sov-
ereignty, we do not ignore other explanations for Cuban behavior. These
include the roles played by: personality and charisma; institutions and organi-
zational dynamics that can corrupt how well an institution fulfills its intended
function; ideology and ideological rigidity; legacies of racism, sexism, and
colonialism; and external adversaries, pressures, and alliances. Yet the frame-
work of Cuba Libre offers a compelling way to understand Cuba and is one
that tends to be denigrated and dismissed in the United States. Cuba libre is
so deeply ingrained in Cuba that we needed to begin our chronological nar-
rative with its origins, when Europeans first encountered Cuba a little more
than five hundred years ago.
* * *
We have written this book to serve the interests and needs of several audi-
ences. Since December 2014, an increasing number of travelers from the
United States—some who devise their own itinerary, some who rely on
licensed organizations, and some who are students at US universities—have
been going to Cuba on educational trips. This history provides them with
the background to appreciate what they have experienced or will encounter.
We expect the book will be useful also for a general audience curious about
Cuba and for those in courses studying Latin America, third world politics, or
Cuba itself. Finally, we hope this book will be instructive for a less obvious
group—those with an interest in US foreign policy.
While Cuba Libre is not about Cuban-US relations, the connections be-
tween Cuba and the United States are so varied and strong that we examine
the history of the relationship extensively in several chapters. In doing so,
we approach the subject empathetically by placing the reader in each coun-
try’s shoes, examining how each understood a particular context and sought
to navigate a course through the context it perceived in order to achieve its
viii Preface
goals. In this regard, note that we refer generally to Cuban leaders Fidel
Castro and Raúl Castro by their first names, unlike our references to US
presidents or other Cuban officials. This decision is due neither to familiarity
nor bias; we name the leaders the way Cubans do.
* * *
When our patient, wise, and creative editor at Rowman & Littlefield, Susan
McEachern, approached us to write this book many years ago, we imag-
ined the task would be relatively easy and benefit from our complementary
strengths. Philip Brenner took the first of his many trips to Cuba in 1974, had
studied the country’s history, and wrote about and taught courses on Cuban
foreign policy and Cuban-US relations. Peter Eisner had reported stories from
Cuba on three different occasions, and had lived in Latin America and written
about the region as a journalist and editor for the Associated Press, Newsday,
and the Washington Post. But as we probed the subject, we realized how
much more we needed to learn. In the process of acquiring this knowledge,
we have built up debts to many more people than we name here, but we do
want to acknowledge some in particular.
We appreciate the research assistance given to us by Sarah Barnett, Alex
D’Agostino, Kathleen Fairchild, Kia Hall, Uri Lerner, Emanuel Saavedra,
Colleen Scribner, Althea Skinner, Paul Sparks, and Simone Williams. Our
special thanks is reserved for Teresa Garcia Castro, whose knowledge and
understanding of Cuban culture and history, and scrupulous dedication to ac-
curacy, strengthened the book in countless ways.
Over the years, many people in Cuba have tried to help us understand the
country. We especially appreciate the time and efforts of Ricardo Alarcon, Car-
los Alzugaray, José Antonio Arbesú, Miguel Barnet, Hope Bastian, Jorge Bo-
laños, José Ramón Cabañas, Soraya Castro, Carlos Ciaño, Tomas Díez, Pablo
Armando Fernández, Alfonso Fraga, Marc Frank, Fernando Garcia, Jorge
Hernández, Rafael Hernández, Warnel Lores, Orlando Marquez, Milagros Mar-
tínez, Pedro Monreal, Martha Morales, Marta Nuñez, Jorge Mario Sánchez,
Ramón Sánchez-Parodi, Ricardo Torres, Josefina Vidal, and Oscar Zanetti.
Philip Brenner benefited from research support by American University’s
Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.
In addition to the essential efforts of Susan McEachern, we appreciate the
professionalism and efficiency of the production team at Rowman & Little-
field, Rebeccah Shumaker and Janice Braunstein.
We will donate our royalties from this book to a scholarship fund for in-
terns at the Institute for Policy Studies named in honor of Saul Landau, who
died in 2013. Saul was a dear friend and colleague who encouraged us to
Preface ix
know Cuba from the perspective of Cubans, to write about Cuba honestly,
and to work tirelessly as he did to improve US-Cuba relations for the benefit
of people in both countries. We hope this book lives up to his demands and
carries on his mission.
Our spouses, Betsy Vieth and Musha Salinas, have endured cheerfully
more absence and aggravation from us than either of our marriage contracts
required, and we have been blessed to have their support.
NOTE
1. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of
the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 4.
Part I
1492–1958
Chapter 1
Columbus Arrives and Spain

Colonizes Cuba, 1492–1550
Those that arriv’d at these Islands from the remotest parts of Spain, and
who pride themselves in the Name of Christians, steer’d Two courses
principally, in order to the Extirpation, and Exterminating of this People
from the face of the Earth. The first whereof was raising an unjust, san-
guinolent, cruel War. The other, by putting them to death, who hitherto,
thirsted after their Liberty, or design’d (which the most Potent, Strenuous
and Magnanimous Spirits intended) to recover their pristin Freedom, and
shake off the Shackles of so injurious a Captivity: For they being taken
off in War, none but Women and Children were permitted to enjoy the
benefit of that Country-Air, in whom they did in succeeding times lay such
a heavy Yoak, that the very Brutes were more happy than they: To which
Two Species of Tyranny as subalternate things to the Genus, the other in-
numerable Courses they took to extirpate and make this a desolate People,
may be reduced and referr’d.
—Bartolomé de las Casas1
COLUMBUS ENCOUNTERS CUBA
“I never saw a lovelier sight. . . . It is the most beautiful island ever seen,”
Captain Christopher Columbus wrote in his journal when he encountered
Cuba.2 The explorer believed it was Japan, the headlands to Cathay, or per-
haps an island that led to the westward passage. The details of Columbus’s
first voyage to the Americas come from the writings of Bartolomé de las
Casas, a Dominican priest whose father sailed on Columbus’s second voyage
to the Americas in 1493. Las Casas himself traveled to the West Indies with
his father in 1502. Still a young man, he recounted the story of Columbus’s
2
Columbus Arrives and Spain Colonizes Cuba, 1492–1550 3
explorations—including portions and a summary of Columbus’s lost journal

of the 1492 voyage.
While lying offshore in a rainstorm, before dawn on October 28, 1492,
Columbus was welcomed by the indigenous inhabitants, men and women na-
ked and bronzed by the sun. These were the Taino Indians; they had watched
and waited as the Spanish ships cautiously approached. The Tainos warmly
welcomed these beings on their godlike vessels that floated on the waters.
Columbus and his men found that the native people were “innocently
simple,” as las Casas wrote, “altogether void of and averse to all manner of
Craft, Subtlety and Malice, and most Obedient and Loyal Subjects to their
Native Sovereigns; and behave themselves very patiently, submissively and
quietly towards the Spaniards, to whom they are subservient and subject.”3
His three ships had arrived in the Americas on October 12, 1492, touching
land in the Bahamas archipelago, most likely on what is now Watling Island.
He referred to the people he encountered—the Taino and other indigenous
groups—as Indians, assuming he had reached India; and these people told
him that further on there was another land they called Colba. An alteration of
that indigenous name from the Taino language gave Cuba its modern name.
Beautiful though it was, the island was protected by shallows and treacher-
ous shoals. Columbus reached Cuba two weeks later, disembarking along the
northeastern coast, probably at or near today’s port town of Gibara.
The expedition to the “New World” was embroiled in European politics,
the drive toward opening trade routes to Asia, and specifically the allure of
discovering new sources of wealth. Columbus had set sail from Spain on Au-
gust 3, 1492, with three ships, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. His voyage
Map 1.1. Map of America by Diego Ribero, 1529. Geography and Map Division, Kohl
Collection no. 41 (4), Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
4 Chapter 1
represented the culmination of seven years of maneuvering and lobbying with

the Spanish court and the kings of Portugal and England. Its official purpose,
to establish a western passage to China and India and to find gold and other
riches, served Columbus’s personal goal of acquiring political power; he later
demanded the title of Great Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Ferdinand and Isabella
financed the fitting of the three ships and agreed to give the Italian explorer
a portion of the wealth he would gather on the journey.
Despite Columbus’s shortcomings as a navigator—faulty calculations fed
his hope and mistaken notion that a voyage of a month would land him in
Asia—the enterprise was equivalent to the most death-defying feat imagin-
able, as if modern-day astronauts were set free from the tethers of the known
world. The prevailing view had been that anyone sailing west would die of
thirst and starvation before reaching land. In fact, no ship of his day could
have stocked enough food and fresh water for the trip he had envisioned.
According to las Casas’s account, Columbus explored Cuba for about five
weeks. Finding neither riches nor signs of the Chinese empire, at the begin-
ning of December he set sail eastward toward Hispaniola in search of gold,
carrying six Cuban Indians as slaves. He and his crew did in fact discover
quantities of gold on Hispaniola’s northern coast. As a result, he left behind
a troop of thirty-nine men on Hispaniola to search for more; loaded the Niña
and Pinta with gold, spices, and provisions; and embarked on the return voy-
age to Europe. The Santa Maria was abandoned after being disabled off the
coast of what is now northwestern Haiti.
Columbus’s return to Europe with his spoils and exotic tales provoked
competition among the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs for mounting a
larger expedition, and Columbus easily was able to outfit sixteen ships.4 He
set out on his second voyage on September 25, 1493, with 1,500 men, many
of whom intended to be colonists and a large cadre of whom would serve as
soldiers to subdue any indigenes who might stand in their way. They brought
munitions, artillery, horses, seeds, and agricultural tools, along with mer-
chandise for trading with the native peoples.5 When he reached the settlement
that he had established on Hispaniola, any hope of peaceful coexistence was
discarded. Columbus found that all the members of his first crew had been
massacred by the Indians, who had recognized quickly the greedy intent and
aggressiveness of the Europeans.
In April 1494, six months after his second arrival in the New World,
Columbus sailed back across the Windward Passage to Cuba. This time he
explored Cuba’s southern coast, moving westward from Guantánamo Bay.
He continued to believe that Cuba was a peninsula, part of the Chinese main-
land, reasoning that no one previously had encountered an island so large.6
Still, without seeing China, he went back to Hispaniola in the late summer.
There he launched a series of punishing attacks on the Indians. When he
subsequently disembarked in Spain at the end of his second expedition, Co-
lumbus displayed five hundred Indians whom he hoped to sell as slaves. He
was greeted as a conquering hero, garnered widespread praise for his daring
adventures, and finally achieved his personal ambition as the Spanish crown
granted Columbus the right to rule over Cuba.
THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF CUBA
The indigenous groups Columbus encountered in Cuba were of the Taino,

Ciboney, and Guanahatabey tribes. Some had arrived on the island from Mex-
ico’s Yucatan Peninsula and South Florida, and some from what is today Ven-
ezuela, between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE. As with the broad range of dates,
there are some questions about their exact origins. Recent evidence suggests
that historians mistakenly had described two of the groups as one: the Ci-
boney had been assumed to be related to the Guanahatabey tribe. However,
it is now believed that they had separate identities and the Guanahatabey,
whose language was never recorded, probably had distinct roots.7 One piece
of evidence for this was that Columbus’s interpreter, a Taino from Hispaniola
who learned Spanish after the 1492 expedition, could communicate with the
Ciboney tribes but was unable to communicate with the Guanahatabey people
he met during Columbus’s 1494 trip. The Tainos and Ciboney are usually
described as Arawak Indians, and the Guanahatabey people as pre-Arawak,
having arrived hundreds of years earlier.8
The Guanahatabey tended to live along the northern coast and on small
keys offshore.9 They were less populous than the Ciboney, who lived mainly
in coastal sections of western Cuba, subsisting on seafood. Their name trans-
lates in the Arawak language from the words for “cave” (siba) and “man”
(eyeri).10 The Ciboney lived in established, stable communities and family
groupings, and devised more sophisticated tools than those made by the Gua-
nahatabey, enabling them, among other things, to construct wooden canoes.
The Tainos, originally from northern South America near Venezuela and
Guyana, reached the northwestern Caribbean islands about 1,000 years before
Columbus’s visit; they usurped land held by the other two tribes and pushed
them further into western Cuba. The origins of the Taino have been subject
to debate. They are usually described as being a branch of the Arawak Nation
or having descended from the Arawaks, perhaps the most widespread clan of
American aborigines.11 Scholars now say that they were as distinct as their
6 Chapter 1
different languages and cultures, and that the Arawak and Taino emerged
from a common ancestor, then developed independently.12
While the indigenous groups that Columbus and his men met on Hispan-
iola were not all Taino, the Europeans used that name for all the people they
encountered on Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. The Taino,
properly identified, were from the northern Caribbean, and their name means
“good” or “noble,”13 distinguishing themselves from a small clan of aggres-
sive Island-Caribs, who lived on the southern islands.
Taino culture was highly organized and hierarchical, with structured living
and farming practices and a class division between nobles and commoners.14
Villages were characteristically built around a large square that served as a
market where residents gathered for social events and recreation. In these
common areas, they often used a ball and fashioned a rectangular court to
play a game called batey.
The local cacique or chief had the best house and lived in a prime location
fronting the village square; in turn, a cacique had assistants, behiques, who
also functioned as priests or doctors. The rank of chief was inherited, and
both men and women could rise to the post. Even though women generally
had lesser standing than men, they did frequently serve as doctors and healers
skilled in the use of medicinal herbs.
Class distinction extended beyond the tribe; the Taino looked down on
members of the Ciboney tribes as being lower class, and sometimes used
them as servants.15 Taino agricultural practices were technologically more
advanced than those of other islanders, and included novel irrigation tech-
niques, as well as mulching and enriching the soil to improve crop cultiva-
tion. Cassava root was a staple, and Taino farmers also grew sweet potato,
squash, beans, peppers, and peanuts, as well as fruits, tobacco, and cotton.
The cotton, in turn, was used to fashion fishing nets, as well as woven to
make rope hammocks.
Many words in contemporary Spanish and even English come from the
Taino, such as: aguacate (avocado), ají (garlic), guayaba (guava), guanábano
(custard-apple tree), güiro (musical instrument made from a cornstalk),
hamaca (hammock), and huracán (hurricane). The names of several Cuban
cities—including Havana, Baracoa, Camagüey, and Bayamo—were derived
from their prior Taino designations.
SPAIN ORGANIZES CONTROL SLOWLY
Despite an initial interest in Columbus’s conquests, Spain took its time to

pursue the riches in these New World territories. It controlled the region via a
permanent settlement that had been established on Hispaniola, where colonial

rulers focused on the increasingly fierce opposition from local indigenous
groups. Very quickly the indigenes had learned that the Spanish explorers
were far from godlike.
By the early 1500s, the murder of the indigenous peoples had become
widespread. It was evident, Bartolomé de las Casas observed, that the con-
quistadors sought gold for quick profit and hardly hesitated to cut down Indi-
ans who stood in their way. The Spaniards treated the Indians, he wrote, “as
the most abject dung and filth of the Earth.”
Perhaps the most infamous early act of violence against the Indians was
a massacre at Xaraguá in 1503, at the hands of Hispaniola’s first colonial
leader, Nicolas de Ovando, who killed dozens of tribal chiefs, including a
local Taino leader, Queen Anacaona. Las Casas, increasingly outraged by
Spanish violence and treachery against the Tainos, reported that dozens of
indigenous leaders and others died.
Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, who had come to the Caribbean with Colum-
bus on the second voyage in 1493, was among the Spaniards who participated
in the Xaraguá massacre.16 A rich Hispaniola landowner by 1509, Velázquez
became known as an effective military commander and launched a series
of genocidal attacks in response to Indian insurrections on Hispaniola. As
Velázquez gained prominence, the Spanish crown sought to recover the con-
cessions it had granted to Columbus, including his claim to control all of the
West Indies.17 This was made easier by Columbus’s death in 1506 in Spain,
apparently from a heart attack. He was about fifty-five years old, still con-
vinced that his four explorations had been along the east Asian coast.
Spain’s King Ferdinand also wanted to establish administrative subdivi-
sions over his newly acquired territories. To do this, he created regional
outposts of the crown. Called audiencias, each was headed by an appointed
royal governor. The king named Christopher Columbus’s son, Diego, gov-
ernor of the first regional outpost at Hispaniola, giving him nominal control
over Cuba as well as Hispaniola. To exercise that function and remove
Diego’s rival from the local center of power, the king directed the younger
Columbus to dispatch Velázquez to Cuba with a small army in order to
establish a settlement there.
Strategically, Cuba was an excellent departure point for regional con-
quest.18 As early as 1513, Pedrarias Dávila sailed from Cuba in order to
explore, subjugate, and settle Central America. Hernán Cortés’s voyage to
Mexico left Cuba in 1519, and Hernando de Soto used Cuba as homeport for
his exploration of Florida in 1538.
In all cases, gold fever was central to Spanish exploration. Early voyages
led to the development of gold mines on Hispaniola, where Indians worked
8 Chapter 1
as slave laborers; the Spaniards assumed they would find just as much gold
in Cuba. In fact, the conquistadors did discover gold in the central highlands
and the Sierra Maestra shortly after establishing the settlement in Bayamo.19
But they quickly depleted Cuba’s gold reserves. Gold production peaked in
1519, when 112,000 pesos of gold were produced, the equivalent of about
$132 million today.20 By the 1540s, Cuban gold generated only 3,000 pesos
annually, far less than could be obtained from Hispaniola.21 With waning gold
extraction, Cuba proved better as a waystation en route to further explorations
for gold, and its importance as a colony declined.
Diego Velázquez arrived in January 1511 with 300 Spanish soldiers at
what is today Guantánamo Bay. His outpost was at Baracoa, and he set up
six more settlements between 1511 and 1515: at Bayamo, Trinidad, Havana,
Puerto Príncipe (present day Camagüey), and Santiago de Cuba, staggered
along the northern and southern Cuban coastline, and Sancti Spíritus, which
was located in the center of the island, about equidistant from the northern
and southern shores. All were intended to play key roles in Spain’s expansion
to Mexico, Central America, and South America.22
THE TAINOS RESIST SPANISH DOMINATION
Velázquez’s progress was hampered at first by fierce attacks from the Gual-
aba Indians, a branch of the Taino.23 The Gualaba were led by Hatuey, a Taino
chief who was thoroughly familiar with Spanish brutality. Hatuey had been
present when Velázquez and his soldiers slaughtered Queen Anacaona and
other Taino chiefs at Xaraguá eight years earlier. The chief evaded capture in
that battle, at first retreating to the mountains in Hispaniola. He later made his
way across the Windward Passage to Cuba with 400 Indian fighters.24
Hatuey resolved to destroy Velázquez and his colony in Cuba. Bartolomé
de la Casas described his stirring speech to his assembled warriors before
engaging in battle. He held up a basket of gold and jewels before them, de las
Casas wrote, and said: “This is their [the Spaniards’] Lord,” he said. “This is
what they serve.” In order to satisfy this idol, he exclaimed, “they will exact
immense treasures from us, and will . . . reduce us to a miserable state of
slavery, or else put us to death.”25
Hatuey’s warriors battled so fiercely that Velázquez was forced to call in
reinforcements led by Pánfilo de Narváez, whose brutality in dealing with the
Indians of Jamaica had already been documented. The battles raged for a year
before Velázquez managed to defeat Hatuey’s warriors. Chief Hatuey himself
was captured and burned at the stake on February 15, 1512.
The defeat of Hatuey—and his warning about the intentions of the Span-
iards—presaged the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of Cuba.
When Velázquez landed in 1511, there were an estimated 100,000 indigenous
people living in Cuba.26 By all accounts they were decimated—the population
was 19,000 in 1519, and by midcentury fewer than 5,000 remained.27 Hatuey,
nevertheless, has become a national hero whom Cubans hold up as a symbol
of courageous resistance to foreign domination.
There were multiple reasons for the death of so many people in such a
brief period, and some of the explanations are controversial. Clearly, many
of the Tainos and others were killed in clashes with the Spaniards, includ-
ing the yearlong battles with Hatuey and his men. But many more died off
the battlefield. Cuban historians Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Oscar Loyola
Vega described the slaughter of two thousand Indians by Pánfilo de Narváez
in 1511 as a “true genocide.”28 As many as one-quarter of the Indian popu-
lation may have committed suicide by hanging themselves, eating dirt, or
ingesting poison, rather than live under European subjugation while lament-
ing the loss of their traditional way of life.29 In their relentless search for
riches, the Spaniards systematically subjugated and enslaved the Indians.30
Disease also was a factor in indigenous deaths. Smallpox epidemics in 1519
and 1530 killed many. Measles, typhoid, and dysentery wiped out whole
villages.31 As mothers died, infant mortality increased with lack of neces-
sary child care.32
Yet the Indian population was not extinguished completely. Some escaped
to isolated islands off Cuba’s coast.33 Others fled to the mountains and were
known as cimarrónes—runaway slaves. So many had died from all causes
that by 1515, Velázquez began to import slaves from other Caribbean islands,
from Central America, and the Yucatán. Within ten years, slaves outnumbered
the indigenous population.34
The native culture also persisted, among other reasons, because of misce-
genation. Among those women who survived, many married Spaniards and,
later, blacks who were brought to Cuba as slaves. A 1514 census recorded that
40 percent of the Spanish men who reported being married had indigenous
wives. Their mestizo children generally took the father’s Spanish name.35
Bartolomé de las Casas was the indigenes’ greatest defender, though his
sermons were laced with more than a touch of paternalism and romanti-
cism. He referred to the indigenous peoples, for example, as “sheep” and
“indolent souls.” They were innocents and had greeted the Spaniards with
reverence, he said, but eventually “were compelled to take up Arms, pro-
voked thereunto by repeated Injuries, violent Torments, and injust (sic)
Butcheries.”
10 Chapter 1
His criticism provoked clerical and popular condemnation of Spanish colo-

nial cruelty and did win some short-term results. With the death of King Fer-
dinand in 1516, his grandson Charles I reorganized the Council of the Indies,
which oversaw the governance of Cuba and Hispaniola and had been blamed
for the harsh Spanish treatment of the indigenous groups.36 A new set of laws
sought to limit the exploitation of the indigenous population in the West
Indies and end the encomienda system under which groups of indigenous
people were granted to Spanish settlers as if they were property. However, in
order to discourage Spaniards from leaving Cuba as its fortunes declined, the
Spanish crown deferred implementation of the Leyes Nuevas on the island.37
NOTES
1. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies

(English version: London, Printed for R. Hewson at the Crown in Cornhil, near the
Stocks-Market, 1689; non-paginated Kindle edition).
2. Columbus named the island “Juana,” for Don Juan, the son of his patrons,
the Spanish regents, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile; Geoff
Simons, From Conquistador to Castro (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 70.
3. A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, chapter 1.
4. Simons, in From Conquistador to Castro, 81, says 18 ships.
5. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Oscar Loyola Vega, Historia de Cuba, 1492–1898,
3rd ed. (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 2006), 43.
6. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 81.
7. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Colum-
bus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 20.
8. Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, “From the Guanahatabey to the Archaic of Puerto
Rico: The Nonevident Evidence,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 3 (2008): 394.
9. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 14–15.
10. Quoted in Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2004), 12.
11. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 16.
12. Rouse, The Tainos, 5–9.
13. Rouse, The Tainos, 5.
14. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 68–69; Rouse, The Tainos, 9, 12, 14,
170.
15. Gott, Cuba, 12.
16. Gott, Cuba, 15.
17. Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia
and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 17–18; Simons, From Con-
quistador to Castro, 85–87.
18. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 5th ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 23; Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 131.
19. Pérez, Cuba, 20.

20. Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 3. A peso, originally a “piece of
eight,” was a coin that contained 27.47 grams of gold. With the price of gold at about
$43 per gram in 2016, a peso would be worth about $1,181.
21. Pérez, Cuba, 20; Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 157.
22. Estrella Rey Betancourt and César Garcia del Pino, “Conquista y colonización
de la isla de Cuba (1492–1553),” in Historia de Cuba: La Colonia, ed. Maria del Car-
men Barcia, Gloria Garcia, and Eduardo Torres-Cuevas (Havana: Instituto de Historia
de Cuba, 1994), 84–85; Gott, Cuba, 20.
23. Rouse, The Tainos, 156; Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 48.
24. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 86–87; Rouse, The Tainos, 56.
25. As quoted in Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 86.
27. Gott, Cuba, 20.
29. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2005), 3–5.
30. Rouse, The Tainos, 157; Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 157.
32. Torres-Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 57–58.
33. Gott, Cuba, 22-23.
36. Miguel León Portilla and Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, América Latina en la
época colonial (Barcelona: Critica España, 2002), 202–3.
37. De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 3.
Chapter 2
Sugar and Slavery
The true story of my life does not begin until 1809, when destiny began to
unleash itself against me with all its fury. For the least childish mischief,
I was locked up for twenty-four hours in a coal cellar without floorboards
and nothing to cover myself. I was extremely fearful and liked to eat. As
one can still see, in order to distinguish an object in my cell during the
brightest midday, a good candle was necessary. Here, after the suffering of
brutal lashes, I was locked up with orders that anyone who might give me
even a drop of water was to be severely punished. Such an order was so
feared in that house that no one, absolutely no one, dared give me as much
as a crumb even if there were an opportunity. . . . From the age of thirteen
to fourteen, the joy and vivacity of my character and the eloquence of my
lips, dubbed the “golden beak,” all changed completely into a certain kind
of melancholy that, with time, became a personal trait of mine. Music
enchanted me, but, without knowing why, I would cry. . . . I would cry
rather than sob, but I was not faint of heart except during certain states of
depression, incurable to this day.
—Excerpt from a slave’s diary, 18401
DECLINE AND RESURGENCE OF

CUBA’S IMPORTANCE TO SPAIN’S EMPIRE
Half a century after Columbus first visited Cuba, the island’s gold reserves
were depleted, and Cuba had become less desirable than many other Span-
ish settlements in the Caribbean. Settlers in Cuba migrated with the Spanish
explorers to Mexico and South America where they found significant new
supplies of gold.2 A Cuban census of six cities in 1544 counted 1,749 people;
only 112 were Spanish. A 1620 estimate placed Cuba’s total population at
12
Sugar and Slavery 13
less than 7,000.3 For decades the small settlements of Cuba used Indians and
African slaves to develop cattle, grow food crops, and cultivate sugar cane,
which had been imported to Cuba from the Canary Islands in 1515.4
Early on, Cuba exported these supplies to other Caribbean colonies. But
as the new colonies became self-sufficient, Cuban exports were no longer
required. By the mid-1550s, many Cuban settlements had vanished: “Fields
were unattended, mines were deserted, towns were abandoned,” historian
Louis Pérez recounts.5 Even the colonial capital, Santiago de Cuba, had been
reduced to little more than a hamlet with thirty households.6
With labor in short supply, the first African slaves were brought in as early
as 1511 to supplement continuing agricultural labor needs. Few European
settlers had remained, and the majority of indigenous people had died from
new diseases or battles with the conquerors. Less than a few thousand Indians
survived, and between 1520 and 1540, Cuba lost 80 percent of its Spanish
population.7 In 1532, there were approximately five hundred African slaves
on the island. Three years later, their number had doubled. A 1544 census
found the African population was almost as large as the Spanish, 29 and 35
percent, respectively.8 In a 1606 count, there were twenty thousand Africans.9
It took several decades for Cuban commerce and colonial life to reju-
venate itself. Eventually, Cuba emerged as a gateway and a new staging
ground for Spanish exploration north, toward Florida and beyond. San Cris-
tobal, on the island’s southern coast along the eastern part of the Gulf of Ba-
tabanó, was Cuba’s first major port. It had become a convenient departure
point for the Spanish conquistadors, such as Hernán Cortés, who departed
from there on his 1519 foray into Mexico during which he conquered the
Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. As Mexico became a major source of gold
and commodities for the Spanish crown, other plunderers recognized San
Cristobal’s usefulness as a gateway.
Ironically, the exploitation of Mexican wealth led to the rise of Havana. Its
location offered an important strategic advantage—it had a natural port that
could serve ship commerce and offer protection from attack. In the 1520s,
settlers began to migrate north from San Cristobal. Stopping at a site along
the Almendares River, close to what is now Havana harbor, they named the
new town San Cristobal de la Habana.10
The new port emerged as a trade center fairly quickly after its founding.
Havana became the key stopover for travelers seeking to restock their sup-
plies or for carousing before and after long, solitary sea voyages. By 1532,
it was the most convenient first stop for ships arriving from Europe or last
stop for ships heading back across the Atlantic laden with cargo from other
colonies. Havana was also the last port from which ships departed without
an escort to protect them from pirates and Spain’s European antagonists
14 Chapter 2
The Origins of the Name “La Habana”
After his first trip to Cuba, Christopher Columbus wrote to his Spanish backers
that “there are in the western part of the island two provinces which I did not
visit; one of these is called by the Indians ‘Avan,’ and its inhabitants are born
with tails.”* “When Spanish soldier-settlers finally reached and conquered the
western part of the island some twenty-five years after Columbus’s voyage,
they were still calling it ‘La Avana’ or ‘La Abana,’ a name which they took from
a word often repeated by the inhabitants, a word recorded by the Spaniards
as Havaguanex or Habaguanex, which they thought to be the name of a local
chief.”† Writing shortly afterward about the harbor where the Spanish settlers
finally located the city of La Habana, Father Bartolomé de las Casas, the
chronicler of the Spanish destruction of native culture in the Caribbean, said,
“There are few harbors in Spain, and perhaps not in any other parts of the
world, that may equal it.”‡
* As quoted in Cluster and Hernández, The History of Havana, 1.

† Cluster and Hernández, The History of Havana, 2.
‡ As quoted in Cluster and Hernández, The History of Havana, 2.
during several sixteenth-century wars. The discovery of the Gulf Stream—

first described by Juan Ponce de Leon, who was a crew member on Colum-
bus’s second voyage to America—added to the advisability of using Havana
as a departure point. Mariners realized that by plying the waters off Havana,
the northeastern flow of the Atlantic current cut down sailing time for ships
heading home to Europe.
As early as 1546, one writer characterized Havana as one of the “most
important and famous cities in the world.”11 Its formal crowning as Cuba’s
center of power came in 1553, when King Charles I of Spain designated
the city as the new capital, replacing Santiago de Cuba. Until then, most of
Havana’s thriving businesses had revolved around transportation and related
services—shipyards, slaughterhouses, produce markets—that provisioned
ships traveling back and forth to Europe.12 Taverns that lodged clothing sup-
pliers also developed, accompanied by thriving side pursuits: prostitution,
gambling, and the production and consumption of alcohol.
With its new importance, security issues grew. As early as Cortés’s ex-
ploration of Mexico, Spanish fleets and settlements were subject to periodic
attacks by pirates and marauders supported by France, Spain’s principal Eu-
ropean rival in the early sixteenth century. Havana itself was a frequent target
for attack by French marauders, and in 1537 a French fleet occupied the city
for nearly a year.13 After Spain won back control, authorities began to build
fortifications to defend settlers from future attacks. The first fortress, the
Castillo de la Real Fuerza, was more a symbolic structure than a meaningful

battlement. Poorly located, it had been built too far into the mouth of Havana
harbor to serve as an early warning site against attacks.
That became all too evident in 1555 when the French pirate Jacques de
Sorés sacked and effectively destroyed the city. Free Indians and African
slaves fought the French onslaught alongside Spanish settlers. But they were
no match for de Sorés’s superior force, which then withdrew before the resi-
dents could summon assistance from other Cuban garrisons.
Charles I responded to the devastating raid with a plan that included the
construction of more substantial fortifications throughout Cuba. Yet only in
1589, more than thirty years after de Sorés’s raid, did the Spanish crown
finally authorize the construction of Havana’s first significant and defensible
fortress—Morro Castle (Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro)—
which was built strategically at the point where the harbor meets the sea.14
Havana’s defense remained far from perfect, though, as the English Royal
Navy captured Morro Castle in 1762 and held it until the following year.
Spain built fortresses similar to Morro Castle in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola,
and Cartagena. Yet the colonies were not always able to withstand attacks by
pirates, notably those supported by Britain, which had been engaged in an
undeclared war with Spain even before the attack on the Spanish Armada in
1588. The most famous and feared among the English pirates and privateers
of the period was Sir Francis Drake, who plundered Spanish settlements
throughout the Caribbean and Spanish commercial ships at sea. Still, the at-
tacks were not enough to weaken Spain’s ability to transfer huge stocks of
minerals and produce home.15
THE EMERGENCE OF THE SUGAR ECONOMY
Cuba Is a Late Bloomer in Producing Sugar

By 1600, Havana was firmly established as Cuba’s central city. With a popu-
lation of 9,000 inhabitants—about 46 percent of the island’s total—Havana
was the hub for its commerce. Increasingly, the city also had become a re-
gional center for the defense of the empire.16 Yet Cuba’s importance to the
Spanish empire would remain principally as a service station for the rest of
the colonies. It was not a source of commodities, as the island’s vast territory
was given more to raising cattle than to agriculture. Only in the eighteenth
century would the introduction of sugar plantations transform the island’s
economy and its political future.
Sugar had been introduced into Cuba from either Jamaica or Hispaniola
in the early 1500s, but the processes for growing, harvesting, and milling
16 Chapter 2
cane were primitive and yields were small. The Spanish crown provided little
investment to develop the island’s capacity for sugar production, choosing to
focus its resources elsewhere. While Hispaniola had six sugar mills and forty
under construction by 1520 and Jamaica had thirty operating sugar mills in
1523, Cuba’s first sugar mills were not built until 1576.17 Until then the small
sugar crop was used mainly to make molasses concentrate, most of which was
consumed on the island itself.18
With the emerging industrial age in the mid-1700s, the Spanish colonial
government sought new sources of raw materials and produce.19 For the first
time, Cuba was viewed as a potential source of agricultural products. Slowly,
farms were established for growing and exporting cotton as well as coffee,
which in particular was well suited to the western mountainous province
of Pinar del Rio. This incipient agricultural industry was still limited by
primitive methods and small farming operations. But to the degree that export
products emerged, cattle production decreased.
British control of Cuba for a little less than one year also contributed to
the rise in agricultural exports and a decrease in Spanish mercantile control.
In 1762, near the end of the so-called Seven Years’ War, a conflict pitting
France and Spain against Britain, a British expeditionary fleet laid siege to
western Cuba and seized Havana. British entrepreneurs descended on the
city, prompting a new drive for sugar production and a surge in slave trad-
ing. More than 10,000 slaves arrived in Havana during the ten months of
British control. The occupation ended with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, under
which British negotiators ceded control of Cuba in return for sovereignty
over Florida. Short-lived though it was, the British influence accelerated the
transformation of the island’s economy and culture. As Louis Pérez aptly
concludes, “If the availability of new markets made the expansion of sugar
profitable, the availability of new slaves made it possible.”20
Industrialization of Sugar Production

In this way, two centuries after its introduction on the island, sugar began its
expansion until it became king, with the Cuban economy restructured into a
monoculture organized around the harvesting and processing of cane on large
plantations. The restructuring was accelerated by steadily growing demand in
Europe and North America, along with one landmark event: the 1804 Haitian
revolution. Culminating a thirteen-year slave rebellion, Haiti’s declaration
of independence provoked European and North American boycotts of Hai-
tian commerce and products, actions intended to punish the victors and to
discourage slave revolts in the Caribbean and the United States. Meanwhile,
French refugees from Haiti headed to Cuba, bringing with them expertise
in streamlined sugar refining methods. Buyers turned increasingly to Cuba,

which accordingly increased sugar production. Between 1792 and 1806 the
number of sugar mills around Havana nearly doubled to 416. Large swaths
of forest—13,000 acres annually in the 1840s—were destroyed to make way
for sugar cultivation.21 The new emphasis on sugar production highlighted
the need to reform agricultural and milling practices, as well as land tenancy
laws, to remove obstacles to the creation of large plantations. In this way
sugar production became more “rational.” As mills were vertically integrated
with the production of cane, plantation owners were able to afford the intro-
duction of newer technologies and the entire process became more efficient.22
Major sugar planters promoted increased acreage and modern innovation
and established a chapter of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País
(the Economic Society for Friends of the Country), a Spanish organization
with branches throughout the colonies aimed at promoting economic devel-
opment. The Cuban branch also focused on its members’ desire to continue
using slaves for the sugar harvest at a point when slavery was being abol-
ished elsewhere.
The resulting agricultural transformation advanced in stages and changed
Cuba in several ways. By the 1860s, sugar provided 80 percent of Cuba’s
exports. Tobacco was about 10 percent of exports; coffee was 2 percent.23
Meanwhile, Cuba became less able to provide food and basic necessities for
its inhabitants and began to rely on imports that could be purchased with
its export income.24 Farming focused on cash crops rather than the produc-
tion of food for internal consumption. The conversion to a sugar export
economy also moved Cuba toward a “special” and unbalanced relationship
it already had been developing with the United States, which offered an ex-
panding market vastly more accessible and convenient than any other trad-
ing partner. By the middle of the nineteenth century, 62 percent of Cuba’s
exports went to the United States and only 3 percent was shipped to Spain.
But 30 percent of Cuba’s imports came from Spain, with only 20 percent
coming from the United States.25
A DUAL SLAVERY SYSTEM
As Cuba’s plantation economy flourished so did growth in its African slave

trade. The custom of using African slave labor in Europe predated Colum-
bus’s voyage to America by almost half a century,26 and Spanish settlers in
Cuba did not hesitate to use West African slaves to fulfill their labor needs.
Between 1790 and 1820 at least 300,000 slaves were sent to Cuba, triple the
total in the previous 280 years.27 This trafficking in humans reflected a cold
18 Chapter 2
calculation of profit and loss, because slave ownership was a significant in-
vestment for a landowner.28 Prior to the rise of sugar, costs often outweighed
gains. In 1610, the mean price of a slave was 203 ducats, in purchasing power
the equivalent of 185 cattle hides or 140 loads of cassava.
Part of the calculus in buying and maintaining slaves was a brutal reality:
it was sometimes less expensive for slave owners to buy a new slave than
to keep existing slaves healthy enough to have children who could also be
enslaved. As a consequence, Cuban slave owners gave little consideration
to the survival of their African laborers. Louis Pérez explains that “Africans
consigned to sugar production toiled under execrable circumstances. Tens of
thousands of men and women were worked remorselessly: six days a week,
eighteen hours a day, often for five and six months at a time. . . . The death of
slaves was passed off as a depreciation of capital stock—all in all, an accept-
able cost of doing business.”29 Annual slave mortality rates, due to illnesses
and inhumane treatment, were as high as 18 percent at some mills. Life ex-
pectancy for a slave averaged seven years after arriving in Cuba.30
In many other colonies, slave trading was on the decline. Britain abol-
ished the practice throughout the empire in 1807, and the US Constitution
forbade the importation of slaves after 1808. Cuban slave shipments con-
tinued well into the 1800s and Cuba became a source for illegal slave sales
to North America.
The depiction of a relentlessly oppressive system of slavery in Cuba is
complicated by the treatment of Africans who were not on sugar plantations.31
Although slavery was still functioning in the 1800s, the Spanish legal code
did not support slavery, and those who had been slaves did not suffer the same
stigma experienced by freed men and women in the United States.32 Historian
Herbert Klein notes that “while slavery was accepted as a historic institution
. . . it was conceived of as an evil necessity rather than a positive good.”33
Africans were employed freely in nearly every aspect of production and
commerce on the island, partly due to the scarcity of white laborers. In Cu-
ban towns, Africans had jobs and sometimes owned property. A majority of
the taverns and lodges in Havana, for example, were owned or managed by
African women. Those Africans in the cities who were slaves tended to have
considerable independence, in stark contrast to rural slaves. Moreover, slaves
had limited legal recognition and the right to own and inherit property apart
from what a master might be willing to allow a slave to possess. Slaves could
even “rent themselves” out to individual employers, and would then pay a
portion of their earnings to their owners. And if they gathered enough money
from their employment, urban African slaves in Cuba also could purchase
their freedom. Eventually a growing cadre of African freedmen and freed-
women were working alongside slaves in urban areas.
The prevailing attitude toward Africans in Cuba gave them a significant

role in Spanish colonial aspirations in the Caribbean. By 1770, blacks and
mulattos made up more than one-fourth of Cuba’s militia.34 As Spain and
Britain fought for power in Europe, Spain depended on the Cuban militia-
men to challenge British holdings in the Western Hemisphere, which gave
black Cuban militiamen “some acquaintance with the rhetoric of indepen-
dence,” as historian Jane Landers observes. One battalion even fought un-
der a flag bearing the words, “Victory or Death,” similar to Patrick Henry’s,
“Give me liberty or give me death.”35 Notably, Cuban leaders adopted the
same theme in the 1960s: Patria o Muerte, Venceremos (Homeland or
Death, We Will Be Victorious).
The first major slave revolt erupted on the estate of Cuatro Compañeros in
1795. Its timing was significant. News of the uprising in Haiti, which began
two years earlier, had crossed the Windward Passage. The ringleader at Cu-
atro Compañeros was José el Francés, who appeared to have been Haitian.
Fear of Haitian influence led Cuban captain-general Jesus de las Casas to
prohibit correspondence with foreigners, and in 1796 to ban the importation
of French-speaking slaves.36
However, word of the successful 1804 Haitian revolution was unstoppable.
Tension increased on Cuban plantations as the large numbers of Africans
swelled the ranks of slaves after 1808. Talk of rebellion spread quickly from
Cuba to other parts of the Caribbean, since the island was a regional and
international transportation hub.37 And then in 1812, as if a growing balloon
finally burst, the tension exploded in the Aponte Rebellion.38
Named for José Antonio Aponte, a moreno (free black) sculptor who had
been a captain in the free black militia, the rebellion was a series of separate
slave insurrections throughout the island. The first one, in January 1812,
took place on plantations surrounding Puerto Príncipe, nearly 400 miles
from Havana, and was the result of coordinated planning. In suppressing this
plantation revolt, the colonial government decided to set a brutal example to
discourage further unrest. Fourteen African rebels were executed in a public
square, while 170 slaves and free blacks were whipped and imprisoned.39
A month later, a series of revolts were staged around Bayamo, in Cuba’s
eastern province of Oriente, about sixty miles west of Santiago. Revolts next
spread to plantations near Holguín and Havana. As the colonial government
fought to suppress the Havana plantation rebellions, they tortured slaves in
an attempt to gather information. As several slaves asserted that Aponte was
the leader of the rebellions, he became the government’s prime target, even
though he actually was not a central figure. In fact, the island-wide insurrec-
tion was neither orchestrated nor coordinated by one central command. Nev-
ertheless, the colonial government arrested Aponte, convicted him of leading
20 Chapter 2
Figure 2.1. Plaque on Aponte Street in Havana: “To José A. Aponte and Comrades,
1812–April 9–1948, Association of Ex-Combatants and Anti-Fascist Revolutionaries of
Cuba.” The bronze plaque disappeared in the 1990s. Photo by Ivor Miller.
the island-wide movement to incite slave insurrections, and hanged him on

April 9, 1812. Then it exhibited his decapitated head publicly as a warning
against further insurrection.40 In figure 2.1, we see a now-missing plaque
dedicated to Aponte and his fellow insurgents.
Two subsequent movements for the abolition of slavery made Cuban
independence an additional goal. They also were named for leading pro-
ponents who have come to be known as the intellectual founders of Cuban
independence: Félix Varela y Morales, a Roman Catholic priest, and José
María Heredia, a poet.41
Born in Havana in 1788, Varela was a professor at the prestigious San
Carlos Seminary College, where he created a department of constitutional
law that produced several of Cuba’s leading advocates for abolition and inde-
pendence. When Varela became a representative to the Spanish Cortes (legis-
lature) in 1821, he brought both campaigns—for the abolition of slavery and
Cuban independence—to the legislative body. In 1823, the Spanish authori-
ties sentenced Varela to death for his activities and he fled to Philadelphia.
There he published an abolitionist paper, El Habanero, which was smuggled
regularly into Cuba. Varela remained in exile until his death in 1853. His
remains were transferred to Cuba in the early twentieth century.
In the same year that Varela departed from Cuba, an independence group
named Los Soles y Rayos de Bolívar (Bolívar’s Offspring) began operations.
The group’s leader, José Francisco Lemus, was a Cuban who had fought with
Simón Bolívar, and the organization received support from anti-imperial
leaders in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina.42 One of its prominent
members was José María Heredia. Perhaps best known for his stirring poem
“Niagara,” Heredia began to be recognized as a major poet in the 1820s.
Cubans today still recall his 1823 poem, “La Estrella de Cuba” (The Star of
Cuba), as a work that was integral to their struggle for independence. It opens
with the phrase “¡Libertad! ya jamás sobre Cuba” (Liberty! Cuba has never
known you), and includes the following stanza:
Today the people dazed, wounded,

Deliver us to the insolent tyrant
Cowardly and stolidly they have not wanted to take up their sword
All lies dissolved, lost
So that my exile shall be a noble tomb
Against terrible, severe fate
Beyond Cuba and my despair.43
Two generations later, the revolutionary leader José Martí spoke of Heredia
as his “literary father.” Heredia, he wrote, “woke in my soul, as in the soul of
all the Cubans, the undying passion for freedom.”44
NOTES
1. Juan Francisco Manzano, The Autobiography of a Slave, trans. Evelyn Picon
Garfield (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 57, 59, 61.
3. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 105.
7. De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 3–5; Dick Cluster and Rafael Hernán-
dez, The History of Havana (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5–6; Torres-
Cuevas and Vega, Historia de Cuba, 52–53, 72; Julio le Riverend, Economic History
of Cuba (Havana: Ensayo Book Institute, 1967), 62; Ilene Ahoha Wright, The Early
History of Cuba, 1492–1586 (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 224–26.
8. Arturo Sorhegui D’Mares and Alejandro de la Fuente, “El surgimiento de la
sociedad criolla de Cuba (1553–1608),” in Historia de Cuba 1492–1898, third edi-
tion, ed. Eduardo Torres-Cuevas and Oscar Loyola Vega (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y
Educación, 2006), 108.
9. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 142.
10. Wright, The Early History of Cuba, 74.
11. Quoted in de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 4–5.
12. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 135–36.
22 Chapter 2
13. Gott, Cuba, 26–27.

14. Gott, Cuba, 29.
15. Gott, Cuba, 33.
16. Sorhegui D’Mares and de la Fuente, “El surgimiento de la sociedad criolla de
Cuba,” 111; Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 132; Pérez, Cuba, 27.
17. Simons, From Conquistador to Castro, 108; Gott, Cuba, 37.
19. Le Riverend, Economic History of Cuba, 134–35.
23. Francisco López Segrera, “Cuba: Dependence, Plantation Economy, and Social
Classes, 1762–1902,” in Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Ca-
ribbean in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons,
and Stanley L. Engerman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 84.
24. López Segrera, “Cuba,” 83.
25. López Segrera, “Cuba,” 83.
27. Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against
Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 9.
28. De la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic, 150.
29. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 28.
31. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor,
1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 10–18; Klein, Slavery in
the Americas, 144–46, 162–63.
32. Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 59–61.
34. Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2010), 140–42.
35. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 142–43.
36. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 38; Manuel Barcia, Domination and Resis-
tance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808–1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University
Press, 2008), 31.
37. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 41–42.
38. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 22, 44–45.
41. Sergio Guerra Vilaboy and Oscar Loyola Vega, Cuba: A History (New York:
Ocean Press, 2010), 17; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 166, 169.
43. José María Heredia, “La Estrella de Cuba,” in Poesias de Don José Maria
Heredia, vol. 2 (New York: Roe Lockwood, 1853), 140–41.
44. José Martí, Obras Completas, vol. 5 (La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba,
1963–1973), 165.
Chapter 3
Struggle for Independence, 1868–1898
I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty, for I under-
stand that duty and have the courage to carry it out—the duty of preventing
the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its
independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our
American lands. . . . I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails;
my sling is David’s.
—José Martí1
By 1830, Cuba and Puerto Rico were Spain’s last remaining colonies in the
Western Hemisphere. Cuba was the more important possession, because it
had become the world’s largest sugar producer. To punish Haiti for winning
independence in 1804—which Europe and the United States viewed in effect
as a successful slave revolt—importers of Haitian sugar initiated a boycott
of the country’s products. In turn, growers shifted production to Cuba, even
though it lacked a sufficient number of plantation workers for the increased
activity. They solved their labor shortage problem by importing more than
40,000 African slaves from 1802 to 1806. This was almost as many as the
number forced into servitude on the island in the previous ten years.2
As generally is the case with migrations, the new immigrants to Cuba
tended to lack the kind of nationalist consciousness necessary for an in-
dependence war. Moreover, there was a decided class difference between
blacks already on the island and the newly arrived Africans. Until the
plantation economy took hold in the nineteenth century, African slaves had
been employed in all aspects of production and commerce. As noted in the
previous chapter, urban slaves were allowed to live in their own homes, to
earn wages by “renting” themselves to other owners, and even to purchase
their freedom. The broad range in the quality of life for Cuban blacks
23
24 Chapter 3
impaired their ability to form a united opposition to the slave system or to

find a common bond for an independence struggle with the newer immi-
grants who worked on the plantations.
The 1842 census revealed that whites were a minority.3 Moreover they, too,
were divided, between the peninsulares and the criollas. Peninsulares were
Spanish-born, remained loyal to the Spanish crown, benefited from Spanish
colonial control, and viewed the Spanish military as their protectors. Most
lived in Cuba’s bureaucratic and commercial centers, essentially acting as
agents of Spain, and they tended to dominate Cuba’s political and commercial
affairs. As a group, they feared that independence would lead to a black-ruled
country that could suffer Haiti’s fate as an international pariah. Indeed, their
stance was encouraged by officials in the United States. Secretary of State
Henry Clay warned in 1825 that the “amount and character of [Cuba’s] popu-
lation render it improbable that it could maintain its independence. Such a
premature declaration might bring about a renewal of those shocking scenes,
of which a neighboring island was the afflicted theatre.”4
Criollas tended to be the rural elites who owned large farms for cattle,
sugar, coffee, and tobacco. Born in Cuba with Spanish ancestry, they would
ultimately fund and organize the start of the Cuban War for Independence.
Their grievances against Spain arose from the failure of the 1865 reform ef-
forts that would have provided the island’s elites with some local autonomy
and relief from some Spanish mercantile controls: trade restrictions, high
tariffs, and taxes. Lower taxes had been especially demanded because the
economy was heading into a depression due to falling sugar prices. When
banks suspended payments on obligations in December 1866, this effectively
halted all sugar transactions. Then in early 1867, without notice, Spain im-
posed new taxes. These were particularly harsh for owners of smaller sugar
plantations in the eastern half of the island and for cattle barons in Camagüey.
In response to the weakening financial conditions, some began to plot rebel-
lion.5 The conspirators included Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the owner of a
modest sugar plantation in the farthest east province of Oriente.
EL GRITO DE YARA
Ten-Year War
On October 10, 1868, Céspedes called together his slaves. To their astonish-
ment, he announced that they were free and asked them to join him in a war
for Cuban independence. His declaration, known as the Grito de Yara or
Cry of Yara, marked the start of the Ten-Year War. Though Céspedes freed
his slaves, the revolutionaries were careful not to include abolition as one of
Struggle for Independence, 1868–1898 25
their goals. They hoped to enlist support from western plantation owners for
whom slaves made up a significant portion of their wealth. That strategy was
successful. Many landowners did support the reformist aims of the rebellion,
which called for ending the limitations imposed by Spanish exploitation and
mercantilist restrictions.6
Still, the Grito echoed noble sentiments reminiscent of those expressed a
century earlier in the US and French revolutions and in the more recent wars
for independence in South America: “We only want to be free and to see all
men with us equally free, as the Creator intended all mankind to be. . . . We
constitute an independent nation because we believe that beneath the Spanish
roof we shall never enjoy the complete exercise of our rights.”7
A revolutionary army that began with 147 men grew to 12,000 fighters and
by the early 1870s counted as many as 40,000 adherents, reflecting a broad
cross-section of the population: men and women, former slaves, free blacks,
white workers, and landowners. The revolutionaries called themselves Mam-
bises, named for Juan Ethninius Mamby, a black Spanish military officer who
joined the successful independence campaign against Spain that had created
the Dominican Republic in 1844.8
The Mambises made equal rights for women a major goal, one of the earli-
est such efforts in modern world politics. That aspiration became an aspect of
Cuban revolutionary identity, especially after the 1959 revolution.9 Ana Be-
tancourt, editor of the revolutionaries’ newspaper, El Mambí, notably called
for women’s equality at the 1869 First Constitutional Assembly of Cuban
Patriots. She declared, “Citizens: The Cuban woman in the dark and peaceful
corner of the home waited patiently and resignedly for this beautiful hour,
when a revolution would break her yoke and untie her wings.”10
The Protest of Baraguá

Contemporary Cuban historians focus on four generals as heroes of the
Ten-Year War and of Cuba’s struggle for independence, with the message
that the July 26th Movement of the mid-twentieth century was the inheritor
of their earlier campaigns: Máximo Gómez (who was from the Dominican
Republic), Calixto Garcia, Ignacio Agramonte, and Antonio Maceo. Maceo
was twenty-two when the war began, and he rose rapidly in a succession
of promotions that recognized his bravery, determination, and skill. His
prominence was especially remarkable because he was young and from a
family of free mulattos.11
The Mambises scored major successes in the early years of the war, em-
ploying asymmetrical guerrilla warfare against the Spanish army’s traditional
military formations. The rebels defeated superior Spanish forces in several
26 Chapter 3
battles, captured some cities, including Bayamo, and established a new gov-
ernment and democratic constitution.
Spain, however, kept the insurgency at bay by using its much larger num-
ber of soldiers and unrelenting technical military superiority. After nine years
of conflict, rifts developed in the insurgency’s political leadership over the
extent to which the war should be waged in the west and over which reforms,
especially abolition, they should advance.12 By 1878, the rebels were ex-
hausted and their resources were depleted. An estimated 50,000 soldiers and
civilians died in the war.
At that point, Spain sent a new military commander to Cuba, Arsenio Mar-
tínez Campos, and offered a compromise to end the conflict. It included some
reforms, a guarantee of amnesty, and freedom for any slaves who had fought
with the Mambises. In February 1878, rebel leaders signed a pact that freed
some slaves and promised future reforms, but left Cuba as a Spanish colony.
General Maceo, however, broke with other Mambises leaders and refused
to accept the pact, because it provided neither independence nor the abolition
of slavery. In the “Protest of Baraguá,” Maceo issued a pledge to continue the
war, declaring: “Our policy is to free the slaves, because the era of the whip
and of Spanish cynicism has come to an end.”13 He retained a fighting force
of about 1,000, but the extension of the conflict ended within six weeks, when
the Spanish military captured Maceo and forced him into exile. Nevertheless,
the “Protest of Baraguá” has become a contemporary rallying cry, represent-
ing Cuba’s determination never to surrender.14
“Maceo’s defiance had two important consequences,” historian Patricia
Weiss Fagen explains. First, the peace agreement ending the conflict “came
to be understood as no more than a truce; second, Maceo’s act strengthened
the determination of his countrymen to renew the war as soon as possible.”15
But Maceo did not return to Cuba until March 1895.
A new rebellion flared up briefly in August 1879, known as the Guerra
Chiquita or the Little War. Initiated by General Calixto Garcia, it was poorly
organized and lacked resources. The fighting ended after thirteen months.16
Maceo remained in exile during the Little War, and Garcia prevented him
from gaining any leadership role under the pretext that Spain would use the
black general’s presence to claim the rebellion was a race war.
CUBA SUFFERS AN ECONOMIC DEPRESSION
In addition to the lives lost, the years of war took a toll on Cuba’s economy.
Dozens of sugar plantations were destroyed. All twenty-four sugar mills in
Bayamo, eighteen mills in Manzanillo, and sixty of the sixty-four mills in
Holguín were lost in the years of fighting. The sugar economy also suffered
from sugar beet production in France and Germany, which began replacing
Cuban cane sugar on the world market.17 The Cuban share of sugar exports
globally dropped from 30 to 11 percent from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s.
The collapse generated widespread unemployment,18 which, along with the
loss of slaves, significantly reduced planters’ wealth. One-third of all cigar
workers lost their jobs; the Havana naval yard closed in 1885; government
workers were laid off, resulting in problems of sanitation and public works.
Five hundred coffee farms halted operation, and coffee production collapsed.
The official end of slavery in 1886 compounded the unemployment problem.
Former slaves competed for jobs, and the surplus of willing labor contributed
to reducing workers’ wages. Increased mechanization also resulted in less
need for labor. On the other hand, with the end of slavery the issue of aboli-
tion no longer was a source of division among independentistas. They had
more reason to form a cohesive opposition to Spanish domination.
Meanwhile the United States had become Cuba’s major trading partner
and source of foreign investment. Cuba’s trade with the United States was six
times greater than with Spain in 1881. By the end of the 1880s, the northern
neighbor was essentially the sole purchaser of Cuban sugar—94 percent of
Cuba’s sugar exports went to the United States. Cuba’s increased dependence
on the United States meant that problems in the US economy would be mag-
nified on the island. And in the 1880s and early 1890s the problems were
enormous, as the United States entered into a prolonged depression.
US economic problems were one reason investors looked to Cuba. At
first, they partnered with existing Cuban land and mill owners. But the North
Americans quickly began to acquire bankrupted estates outright. By 1895, US
investments in Cuba totaled at least $50 million, and only 20 percent of the
mills were owned by Cuban families of the former planter class.19 The new
foreign investors combined smaller farms into larger operations, known as
ingenios and centrales, the latter acting as a central agricultural facility that
generally produced more than just sugar. As investments spurred increased
mechanization, there was less need for labor. So while the increased effi-
ciency helped to restore the macro Cuban economy in the 1890s, the spread
of capital-intensive processes produced unemployment and discontent.
A new boost for Cuban sugar production came when the US Congress
passed the US Tariff Act of 1890, which removed the duty on raw sugar
imports into the United States. Exports jumped from 632,000 tons in 1890 to
more than one million tons in 1894. It was a sign that Cuba was becoming
more than just dependent on the United States for its economic health; the
relationship led to total Cuban integration into the US economy.20 This state
of affairs ran both ways; Cuban economic health depended on US purchasing
28 Chapter 3
power. At the same time, political changes in Cuba had a greater impact than
ever before on US investors and therefore on US politics.
Class relations in Cuba changed correspondingly as economic ties with the
United States tightened. The takeover by foreign investors meant that “Cuba
would no longer possess a wealthy class that was independent of US capital,”
historian Jules Benjamin explains. As a result, no large and self-conscious
Cuban class existed to oppose the ownership of land or basic infrastructure
by capitalists from the United States and Canada.21 One sign of Cuban depen-
dency appeared in the early 1890s when another wave of economic depres-
sion hit the United States. The US government raised sugar tariffs once more,
sending Cuban revenues and the overall economy tumbling as well.
THE INDEPENDENCE WAR
While the Cuban business sector’s ardor for independence was tempered by
its subservience to foreign investors, the longtime demands for ending colo-
nial rule among other sectors of the population were reaching heights not seen
since the Ten-Year War. The unlikely leader who brought together the various
factions was a five-foot-tall essayist, journalist, and poet who lived in New
York, José Martí. Born in Havana in 1853 to poor Spanish immigrants, Martí
began his first attacks on Spanish colonial rule in La Patria Libre (The Free
Homeland), a newspaper he started at the age of sixteen, during the Ten-Year
War. Today, Cubans of all political leanings regard him as the father of Cuban
independence because of his devotion to the fight for Cuba’s sovereignty.
Martí gathered independentistas under the banner of the Cuban Revo-
lutionary Party in 1892. With Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo, and other
veterans of the Ten-Year War, he began to coordinate preparations for what
the group hoped would be a final struggle to achieve independence. Their
campaign (in Cuba it is often called “The Necessary War”) opened on
February 24, 1895, in the eastern province of Oriente, the cradle of Cuban
insurrections. The Spanish Army had put down a number of other small in-
surrections since the Little War of 1879–1880. But this time the insurgents
were better prepared and organized. By the end of 1895, the struggle for
independence had engulfed the entire island. Scattered insurgencies had
coalesced into a coherent force of 50,000 fighters organized into twelve
divisions and eighty-five regiments.22
Six weeks after returning to Cuba via the Dominican Republic with
General Gómez, Martí was killed in combat on May 19, 1895. As a martyr,
Martí continued to inspire the new Mambises as they rallied around his no-
tions of Cuba libre. These emphasized the unity of the nation, the creation
“Our America” by José Martí*
And in what patria can a man take greater pride than in our long-suffering
republics of America . . . ? Never before have such advanced and con-
solidated nations been created from such disparate factors in less historical
time. . . . The colony lives on in the republic. . . . Therefore the urgent duty
of our America is to show herself as she is, one in soul and intent, rapidly
overcoming the crushing weight of her past and stained only by the fertile
blood spilled by hands that do battle against ruins and by veins that were
punctured by our former masters.
The disdain of the formidable neighbor who does not know her is our
America’s greatest danger, and it is urgent—for the day of the visit is near—that
her neighbor come to know her, and quickly, so that he will not disdain her.
Out of ignorance, he may perhaps begin to covet her. But when he knows her,
he will remove his hands from her in respect. One must have faith in the best
in man and distrust the worst. One must give the best every opportunity, so
that the worst will be laid bare and overcome. If not, the worst will prevail.
. . . There is no racial hatred, because there are no races. . . . The soul, equal
and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color. Anyone
who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races is commit-
ting a sin against humanity.
*Published in El Partido Liberal (Mexico City, March 5, 1892), trans. Jerry A. Sierra; reprinted from
HistoryofCuba.com, http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/marti/America.htm.
of a republic that would serve all Cubans equally, and the ability of Cuba
to act independently in its own interests. This platform set the stage for
an inevitable clash with the United States because the insurgents not only
demanded Cuban independence from Spain, they sought to make Cuba sov-
ereign and uncontrolled by any foreigners—“Cuba for Cubans,” as Louis
Pérez summarized the goal.23
The 200,000-soldier Spanish garrison at first seemed sufficient to counter
the independentistas. Spain fought back against the revolutionaries with
enormous brutality, razing villages and driving Cubans out of their homes.
This became the typical Spanish mode of warfare, especially after General
Valeriano Weyler arrived in February 1896. Known as “The Butcher,”
Weyler was the personification of inhumane and ruthless counterinsurgency
warfare.24 Asserting that “I believe that war should be answered with war,”25
Weyler began with a tactic that he called “reconcentration.” He ordered his
soldiers to forcibly relocate peasants from the countryside into towns and
then to destroy their crops, cattle, and houses so that revolutionaries would
not be able to live off the land.
30 Chapter 3
Weyler focused initially on the western province of Pinar del Río where
Antonio Maceo, the resolute general of the Ten-Year War, had returned from
seventeen years in exile to join the new revolution. At first Weyler’s tactics
produced some victories, despite widespread criticism of his methods. But
public opinion turned decisively against him when his troops killed Maceo
in cold blood on December 7, 1896. Weyler denied charges about the manner
of Maceo’s death, but editorialists in the United States doubted his word. The
New York Times wrote: “There is a multitude of circumstances confirmatory
of the report that Maceo was invited to a parley by the Spaniards and mur-
dered. Such a story would not be believed of the English or the French or the
Germans. . . . It is believed of Weyler.”26
Faced with unrelenting criticism, Spain recalled Weyler at the end of 1897,
canceled the reconcentration program, and proclaimed a new policy of home
rule with limited autonomy for Cuba. An “Autonomist” colonial government
was formed in January 1898, following the lines of the liberal Autonomist
Party, which had argued for twenty years that such reforms would prevent
bloodshed and insurrection. But the Spanish gesture came too late, especially
because Weyler had targeted Autonomists for imprisonment and deporta-
tion. In addition, the Spanish army’s morale was low and its losses were
crippling. Of the 200,000 Spanish troops deployed to the war, 11,000 had
been wounded, 4,000 were killed in battle, and 41,000 died from dysentery,
malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.27 Weyler’s repressive tactics also
stimulated broad support for the revolutionaries.
The new government gained little support from Spaniards on the island
who had given up hope for a Spanish solution. The only viable solution they
now envisioned was US intervention. Indeed, assessments of the war by both
Madrid and Washington predicted that the rebels would likely win the war by
the end of 1898.28 Business leaders and property owners in Cuba also antici-
pated an insurgent victory and appealed to the United States either to annex
Cuba or “to save us.” “The Mother Country cannot protect us,” declared a
group of business leaders. “If left to the insurgents our property is lost.”29
NOTES
1. José Martí, “To Manuel Mercado,” trans. Eliana Loveluck, in The Cuba Reader:
The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove,
1988), 28–29.
2. D. R. Murray, “Statistics of the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790–1867,” Journal of
Latin American Studies 3, no. 2 (1971): 134, http://latinamericanstudies.org/slavery/
Cuba-slave-trade.pdf.
3. The 1842 census counted 1,037,624 inhabitants: 436,495 black slaves, 152,838
free blacks, and 448,291 whites. Philip S. Foner, Antonio Maceo: The ‘Bronze Titan’
of Cuba’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977),
10–11; Pérez, Cuba, 70–73, 80–82.
4. Quoted in Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular
Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 42.
5. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 50.
7. Quoted in Foner, Antonio Maceo, 15.
8. An alternate explanation of the derivation of the name is provided in Teresa
Prados-Torreira, Mambisas: Rebel Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2005), 1. She attributes mambisa to the distortion by
Spanish soldiers of a common Yoruba prefix, mbi.
9. Prados-Torreira, Mambisas, 151; K. Lynn Stoner, “Militant Heroines and the
Consecration of the Patriarchal State: The Glorification of Loyalty, Combat, and Na-
tional Suicide in the Making of Cuban National Identity,” Cuban Studies 34 (2003): 92.
10. Quoted in Prados-Torreira, Mambisas, 84.
11. Patricia Weiss Fagen, “Antonio Maceo: Heroes, History, and Historiography,”
Latin American Research Review 11, no. 3 (1976).
12. Pérez, Cuba, 96–97.
13. Quoted in Foner. Antonio Maceo, 81.
14. For example, Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso En el Acto de Conmemoracion del
Centenario de la Protesta de Baraguá, Santiago de Cuba,” March 15, 1978, http://
www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1978/esp/f150378e.html. Authors’ translation.
15. Fagen, “Antonio Maceo,” 71.
16. Foner, Antonio Maceo, 94–97.
17. Pérez, Cuba, 100, 107.
18. Pérez, Cuba, 101–3. There actually was an increase in total exports from $51
million in 1885 to $67 million in 1890, but the one-third increase in the value of ex-
ports masked systemic weaknesses in key sectors.
19. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 60–61.
20. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 62–63.
21. Jules Robert Benjamin, The United States and Cuba: Hegemony and Depen-
dent Development, 1880–1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 4.
22. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History
and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 7.
24. John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 156–60, 184.
26. “Weyler’s Denials,” New York Times, December 16, 1896.
27. Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 9–10.
28. Pérez, Cuba, 139–40.
29. Quoted in Pérez, Cuba, 89.
Chapter 4
Cuban Independence War

and US Occupation
When the revolution in Cuba broke out young [Adolfo] Rodríguez joined
the insurgents, leaving his father and mother and two sisters at the farm.
He was taken, in December of 1896, by a force of the Guardia Civil, the
corps d’élite of the Spanish army, and defended himself when they tried
to capture him, wounding three of them with his machete. He was tried by
a military court for bearing arms against the government, and sentenced
to be shot by a fusillade some morning before sunrise. . . . He made a
picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage and dignity,
that he reminded me on the instant of that statue of Nathan Hale which
stands in the City Hall Park, above the roar of Broadway. The Cuban’s
arms were bound, as are those of the statue, and he stood firmly, with his
weight resting on his heels like a soldier on parade, and with his face held
up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But there was this difference, that
Rodríguez, while probably as willing to give six lives for his country as
was the American rebel, being only a peasant, did not think to say so, and
he will not, in consequence, live in bronze during the lives of many men,
but will be remembered only as one of thirty Cubans, one of whom was
shot at Santa Clara on each succeeding day at sunrise.
—Richard Harding Davis1
US INTERVENTION IN THE CUBAN INDEPENDENCE WAR
Popular US sentiment to intervene in Cuba’s independence war grew steadily

in 1896. As the violence spread, and as Spain’s powerlessness became more
evident, US investors feared the economic result of a rebel victory. A fully
independent Cuba seemed to be a serious threat to their investments, trade
32
Cuban Independence War and US Occupation 33
privileges, and dominance in the region. Yet the protection of property owned
by US companies was not the only reason the United States was now inclin-
ing itself toward intervention.
Multiple Motivations for Intervention

In the 1890s, the United States underwent a series of debilitating shocks.2
First, the 1890 US census reported the “frontier” no longer existed—settle-
ments now occupied nearly all unclaimed land. The concept of the frontier
had contributed to a common narrative that the United States was exceptional,
a country of unbounded opportunity where individuals could succeed based
on their own merits and self-reliance. The frontier also had served as an
escape valve from the oppression of early industrialization, which delayed
the formation of meaningful trade unions in the United States. Notably, the
American Federation of Labor was founded at this time, in 1886, long after
trade unions were active in Europe.
The closing of the frontier, only a generation after the Homestead Act had
offered free land to anyone, had a psychologically demoralizing effect on
the country. But the widespread foreclosure sales of the farms acquired by
homesteaders were even more debilitating. Their outrage fueled the Populist
Movement, which arose in this period. In part, the farmers’ losses were due
to the collusion of large banks, railroad companies, and an emerging agribusi-
ness industry that had provided easy loans for seeds, machinery, and other
supplies collateralized by the farms.
Debtors soon began demanding that the government reduce the value of
their loans by inflating the US currency, circulating dollars that had no back-
ing (“greenbacks”) or that were backed by both silver and gold (“bimetal-
lism”). At the same time, millions of factory workers had no escape valve
when they lost their jobs during the economic depression that began in 1893,
which was even more severe than the deep recession of the 1880s.3 The coun-
try seemed as if it was on the verge of a revolution as striking workers battled
company guards, police forces, and sometimes the national guard.
The collusion and greed of the new captains of industry provided an easy
explanation for the economic chaos. A more complex analysis pointed to
technological advances that had made US companies so efficient that they
were producing more goods than could be consumed by the US market. The
culprit of overproduction had validity and appealed to a group of political
leaders who believed US greatness could be achieved only by expanding the
country’s influence globally. Their primary targets were markets in Asia.4
This objective also seemed to provide a solution to the economic problems
at home.
34 Chapter 4
The Route to Asia Lies via Cuba

But US entry into Asia was blocked by the colonized outposts—such as In-
dia, Indonesia, and Indo-China—of European imperial powers who also had
carved up China with closed deals. Of the remaining countries still available,
the Philippines was the most desirable because Spain was having difficulty
in suppressing an independence struggle there.5 Coincidentally, Spain was
having the same problem in Cuba.
Cuba itself had long appealed to dreamers of American expansion. Secre-
tary of State John Quincy Adams famously asserted in 1823 that “there are
laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by
the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba,
forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapa-
ble of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union.”6
Cubans disdainfully call his statement the “ripe fruit theory.” Thomas Jef-
ferson wrote to President James Monroe in 1824 that “I candidly confess,
that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could
ever be made to our system of States.”7 William Henry Seward, Secretary of
State from 1861 to 1869, reasoned that the United States should annex Cuba
because “every rock and every grain of sand in that island were drifted and
washed out from American soil by the floods of the Mississippi, and the other
estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico.”8
But President William McKinley was reluctant to engage with Spain and
sought other ways to fix the lagging US economy. In part, he was concerned
that the end of Spanish control over Cuba would create complications others
had not foreseen.9 Annexing Cuba was undesirable, McKinley thought, because
the island’s population was dominantly of African origin. Instead he supported
Spanish rule and urged Spain both to end the insurrection quickly and to pro-
tect US property. He also urged the dismissal of General Weyler, an end to the
abuses characteristic of Weyler’s command, and home rule reforms.
As 1897 morphed into 1898, McKinley realized that Spain was losing the
war in Cuba. In an attempt to forestall the inevitable, he dispatched the USS
Maine to Cuba in January 1898 as a way to bolster flagging Spanish morale
and as a warning to the rebels not to harm US citizens or property owned by US
companies. The move came too late. Several US political leaders saw in the Cu-
ban independence war an opportunity to demonstrate that the United States had
reached the point where it could play a new world role, despite the depression.
The Maine Explodes

The Maine sailed into Havana harbor on January 25, 1898. In one of the most
storied incidents in early US naval history, a blast ripped through the battle-
ship three weeks later. Two hundred sixty-six sailors died. A 1975 US naval
inquiry determined that the explosion was probably the result of “heat from
a fire in the coal bunker adjacent to the 6-inch magazine,” not an external
source such as a Spanish mine.10
But in 1898, the theories and rumors about what had happened focused
on Spain. The yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph
Pulitzer’s competing newspapers, which claimed that Spanish saboteurs had
blown up the ship, fueled a burst of popular passion in the United States.
Cries of “Remember the Maine” brought demands of US retaliation against
Spain. Hearst’s New York Morning Journal was the first paper in the United
States to sell one million copies in one day—the day after the Maine’s ex-
plosion.11 Figure 4.1 displays a depiction of Spaniards that would have been
commonplace during this time period.
Figure 4.1. The July 9, 1898, issue of Judge was typical in the way
it portrayed to a US audience the nature of Spain’s cruelty in Cuba.
36 Chapter 4
The anti-Spanish narrative followed naturally from depictions of Weyler’s

brutality and cartoons of Cuba as a damsel in distress who called for help
from the United States. Pro-interventionists took up the cry, asserting that
US intervention would be a noble and selfless action.12 For those who also
favored expansion into Asia, a war against Spain offered an opportunity to
gain a foothold in Asia by taking advantage of Spain’s declining fortunes in
the Philippine Independence War.
McKinley responded to the Maine explosion by beefing up Admiral
George Dewey’s US Navy fleet in the Pacific and approved an order, issued
originally by Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt, that if the United
States declared war against Spain, Dewey should attack the Spanish fleet at
Manila. After two months of unrelenting reports and editorials by the news-
paper barons, and demands from members of Congress responding to the
popular calls for retaliation, the president asked Congress for a declaration of
war on April 11, 1898.
The resulting congressional debate lasted more than a week and revealed
basic disagreements about US war aims. Some favored taking Cuba as a US
territory. Notably, McKinley’s war message made no reference to Cuban in-
dependence. Three groups opposed that position. One did not want a territory
predominantly populated by blacks to seek statehood. A second objected to
imperial interventions that seemed to mimic European practices. The third
group in effect represented the US sugar beet industry, which feared competi-
tion from Cuban sugar if the island were annexed.13 Their leader was Senator
Henry M. Teller (D-CO), whose successful amendment to the war declara-
tion prohibited the United States from exercising “sovereignty, jurisdiction,
or control over said Island [Cuba] except for the pacification thereof,” and
asserted the US determination “to leave the government and control of the
Island to its people” after pacification was achieved.
THE UNITED STATES DENIES INDEPENDENCE TO CUBA
“A Splendid Little War”

Despite passage of the Teller Amendment, US engagement in the conflict
effectively stole Cuban independence from the Cubans. Consider how even
the name commonly applied to the conflict in the United States, “Spanish-
American War,” disregards the role of Cubans and betrays an ignorance
about the limited importance of the US contribution in securing victory
against Spain. In Cuba, the conflict is called the Spanish–Cuban–North
American conflict and is viewed as a continuation of the 1868 Cuban War
of Independence.14 As a parallel, imagine the US reaction if the French,

because of their contributions to the victory over Britain in 1783, referred
to the US War of Independence as the Franco-British War.
McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers to supplement the 30,000-person
regular army. More than one million men answered the call. Ultimately,
about 180,000 volunteers were mustered into service and received a scant
few days of training. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the ardent advocates of the
war, resigned his post at the Navy Department and received a commission
as an army officer. Focusing on style along with substance as he gathered a
fighting force, Roosevelt immediately placed an order with Brooks Brothers
for an “ordinary cavalry lieutenant colonel’s uniform in blue Cravenette.”15
Many of his recruits were Native Americans and cowboys from South Da-
kota, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, along with personal friends from
New York’s high society.
Roosevelt dubbed his 1,060-member unit the “Rough Riders” (officially
it was the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry). “In all the world,” he wrote,
“there could be no better material for soldiers than that afforded by these grim
of the mountains, these wild rough riders of the plains.”16 In fact, like most
members of the expeditionary army, the Rough Riders were poorly trained and
equipped. Fewer than three-quarters of the original group set off for Cuba, and
many arrived without horses, which could not be accommodated on the boats.
While the future president made sure he would receive good press, a bal-
anced look at the record showed that Roosevelt did not wage his battles
brilliantly. In the famous charge up “San Juan Hill”—it actually occurred on
Kettle Hill in the San Juan Mountains—Roosevelt ignored warnings from
a few Cuban fighters with him that Spanish scouts had spotted them. They
were lucky to escape alive, thanks to the poor aim of Spanish rifles and the
arrival of reinforcements who brought rapid-fire Gatling guns. The Gatlings
wreaked havoc against the Spanish forces, discharging 18,000 rounds in less
than nine minutes.
The US military involvement did not last long; the Spanish were essen-
tially routed by July 1898. US warships ran Spain’s four best battleships
aground in Santiago harbor as they tried to flee, and the city fell to US
troops two weeks later. Though a ceasefire would not take effect until Au-
gust 12, US Secretary of State John Hay wrote to Roosevelt from London
on July 27, “It has been a splendid little war; begun with the highest mo-
tives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that
Fortune which loves the brave.”17
In fact, “splendid” was far from an accurate characterization of the conflict.
During the three-month campaign, US soldiers suffered 385 battle deaths,
38 Chapter 4
2,061 deaths from other causes (mainly from yellow fever and malaria), and
1,662 wounded. During the three years of fighting from 1895 to 1898, more
than 60,000 Spanish soldiers died. Cuban deaths and injuries in the thirty
years of independence wars from 1868 to 1898 remain uncertain, though it is
likely that several thousand were killed in battle and hundreds of thousands
died because of the problems caused by conflict. One-third of the generals
in the Cuban Liberation Army died. As an indication of deaths alone, Cuba’s
population in 1868 was 1.8 million; in 1898, it was 1.5 million. An 1899
count found that one of every two wives in Cuba was a widow.18
US Occupation Follows the Treaty of Paris

The war ended with a US-Spanish treaty that Cuba did not sign. The United
States and Spain excluded Cuban representatives from the negotiations in
Paris and even from the signing ceremony on December 10, 1898. The Treaty
of Paris provided for the formal surrender of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba
to the United States on January 1, 1899. The US attitude toward the Cubans
remained exactly what it had been during the war—contempt toward their na-
tional aspirations for Cuba’s full independence and sovereignty. The first US
military governor of Cuba, General John Brooke, made that explicit. Cubans
“cannot now, or I believe in the immediate future, be entrusted with their own
government.”19 A New York Times news story reported that “the Cubans who
have made a pretense of fighting with us have proved worthless in the field
and unappreciative of modern conditions and humanity and justice in war.
It would be a tragedy, a crime, to deliver the island into their hands.” The
article’s headline was, “Cubans Not Fit to Govern.”20
NOTES
1. Richard Harding Davis, The Death of Rodriguez, A Year from a Reporter’s Note
Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897).
2. Key points in this subsection are drawn from Walter LaFeber, The New Empire:
An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1963), 63–72, 176–203, 379–406.
3. The national unemployment rate went from 3.7 percent in 1892 to 8.1 percent in
1893 and 12.3 percent in 1894. See Christina Romer, “Spurious Volatility in Historical
Unemployment Data,” Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 1 (February 1986): 31.
4. Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism
from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010), chapters 3–4.
5. Richard Hofstadter, “Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny,” in The

Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1965), 147–48.
6. John Quincy Adams, “Letter to Hugh Nelson, April 28, 1823,” in Writings of
John Quincy Adams, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: Macmillan, 1913),
vol. 7, 373.
7. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Monroe, October 24, 1824,” in The Writ-
ings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (Washington, DC: The Thomas
Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), vol. 15, 479.
8. As quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy
at Home and Abroad Since 1750, second edition (New York: Norton, 1989), 144.
9. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 170–74; LaFeber, The American Age, 185–90.
10. Hyman George Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Washing-
ton, DC: Department of the Navy, 1976), 128, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=m
dp.39015004705649;view=1up;seq=7.
11. Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the
Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 17.
12. Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 138.
13. Carmen Diana Deere, “Here Come the Yankees! The Rise and Decline of
United States Colonies in Cuba, 1898–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review
78, no. 4 (November 1998): 732.
14. Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Is Normalization Possible in Cuban-US Rela-
tions after 100 Years of History?” Research Report no. 6 (Havana: Instituto Supe-
rior de Relaciones Internacionales, 2002), https://www.ecured.cu/Guerra_de_los_
Diez_A%C3%B1os.
15. LaFeber, The American Age, 194.
16. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1900), 24.
17. Letter from John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt, July 27, 1898; reprinted in
Scribner’s Magazine 66 (July–December 1919), 533, https://play.google.com/
books/reader?id=peU-AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&p
g=GBS.PA533.
19. Quoted in Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 114 [emphasis in original].
20. Stanhope Sams, “Cubans Not Fit to Govern; This Is the Opinion of an Observer
Who Accompanied Shafter’s Army to Santiago,” New York Times, July 29, 1898, 4.
Chapter 5
From Occupation to “Good Neighbor”
Whereas the Congress of the United States of America, by an Act ap-

proved March 2, 1901, provided as follows:
[T]he President is hereby authorized to “leave the government and
control of the island of Cuba to its people” so soon as a government shall
have been established in said island under a constitution which, either as
a part thereof or in an ordinance appended thereto, shall define the future
relations of the United States with Cuba, substantially as follows:
That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exer-
cise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the
maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property,
and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to
Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be as-
sumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.
That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba,
and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the gov-
ernment of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for
coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with
the President of the United States.
—Platt Amendment (excerpts)
US OCCUPATION
Preparing Cuba for US Economic Domination

With the rationale that the Cubans had to be instructed in the ways of “civi-
lization,” US colonial administrators established Cuba’s rules of commerce,
remarking that “we are dealing with a race that has steadily been going down
40
From Occupation to “Good Neighbor” 41
for a hundred years and into which we have to infuse new life, new principles
and new methods of doing things.”1
The resulting policy was the opposite of independence, wrote one Cuban
economist. Rather it was intended to prepare Cuba for US “economic pen-
etration.”2 The US military government ordered the Cuban Liberation Army
to disarm and the provisional government and Cuban Revolutionary Party to
disband. It mandated that a newly elected assembly could not make laws that
contravened US military decisions.
US corporations readily took advantage of the opportunity that the occupa-
tion provided, expanding their investments in sugar, tobacco, and land.3 Ap-
proximately 13,000 people from the United States had acquired land titles by
1905. US individuals owned 60 percent of Cuba’s rural land; Cubans owned
25 percent. Foreign capital flooded Cuba, and favored US-owned operations,
driving Cubans further out of business. Iron mines in Oriente Province were
almost all US owned.
Opponents of the US occupation in Congress soon demanded an end
to the US presence as specified in the 1898 Teller Amendment, while the
Cubans themselves called for US troops to leave. Meanwhile the McKinley
administration accepted plans for a new Cuban constitution to be written by
an elected assembly, but sought continued control by designating a list of ac-
ceptable candidates who could be chosen. In the election to create a constitu-
ent assembly in 1900, Cuban voters refused to select the US candidates and
instead chose an independent slate to draft the new constitution.
US officials said the election proved their point of view that Cubans were
irresponsible and unfit for self-government. General Leonard Wood, the US
military governor, said those chosen to write the constitution were among the
“worst agitators and political radicals in Cuba.”4 The result was an impasse in
which opponents of Cuban annexation continued to pressure for withdrawal,
while administration officials in Washington agreed with business leaders that
US departure would threaten US property interests and influence.
The Platt Amendment

Secretary of War Elihu Root, a former Wall Street lawyer, crafted a seeming
compromise that would adhere to the requirements of the Teller Amendment
but vitiate the essence of Cuban independence. Senator Orville Platt (R-CT)
added Root’s clever loophole as an amendment to an army appropriation bill
that Congress passed in 1901.
The Platt Amendment stipulated, among other things, that the United States
could intervene in Cuba to restore order whenever it saw fit; that Cuba lease
territory to the United States for up to three naval coaling stations; and that
42 Chapter 5
Cuba could not enter into a treaty that offered a military base to any other
country. The legislation also required Cuba to include the amendment in its
new constitution as a condition for the end of US occupation.
Cubans staged demonstrations in Havana and Santiago to protest the Platt
Amendment. The constituent assembly rejected its inclusion in the new Cu-
ban constitution by a 14–2 vote. Members of the assembly, however, changed
their minds after they sent a delegation to Washington to meet with US of-
ficials. Root, calling the Cubans “ingrates,” was adamant that the US occupa-
tion would not end unless Cuba acquiesced.5 Other US officials echoed his
position, telling the Cuban delegation that if the Platt Amendment was not
included in Cuba’s constitution, the United States would not grant freedom
to Cuba. Despite such a seemingly firm US stance, the constituent assembly
approved including the Platt Amendment in the new Cuban constitution by
only one vote.
US cynicism and insincerity outraged Cubans. The amendment mocked
terms such as “liberty” and “independence,” even though Platt asserted in
a 1901 article that with his codicil “the United States set a high and new
example to the nations of the world and gave a mighty impetus to the cause
of free government.”6 He argued that the United States, in his estima-
tion, became the first conquering nation in history to relinquish territory
without giving up responsibility for those whom it had conquered. More
candidly—until May 9, 2017—in its official history, the US State Depart-
ment acknowledged that the real goal of the Platt Amendment was to deny
effective independence to Cuba:
The rationale behind the Platt Amendment was straightforward. The United
States Government had intervened in Cuba in order to safeguard its significant
commercial interests on the island in the wake of Spain’s inability to preserve
law and order. . . . By directly incorporating the requirements of the Platt
Amendment into the Cuban constitution, the McKinley Administration was able
to shape Cuban affairs without violating the Teller Amendment.7
Roosevelt’s rise to power was one of the most meteoric in US history up to

that time, and closely meshed with US plans for Cuba. As assistant secretary
of the navy in 1897 and 1898, he had advocated a new role for the United
States in the world and promoted war with Spain. Within months of his
vaunted charge at the head of the Rough Riders, he was elected governor of
New York. He served two years of his term, then won the vice presidency on
November 6, 1900, as President McKinley’s running mate. When McKinley
died from an assassin’s gunshot wounds on September 14, 1901, Roosevelt,
at the age of forty-two, became the youngest person ever to be president of
the United States.
THE PSEUDO-REPUBLIC
A “Special Relationship” with the United States

The US occupation formally ended on May 20, 1902, a date the new Cuban
government designated as “independence day” and which is still recognized
as such today by some Cuban-Americans and the US government. Yet the de-
parting troops left Cuba with only limited possibilities for self-determination.
US military and economic interests would continue to govern the fortunes of
the island for the next half century. Generations of Cubans would look to the
Platt Amendment as an example of US duplicity that would justify their dis-
trust of the United States a century later. While President McKinley’s predic-
tion would prove true—Cuba and the United States would develop a “special
relationship” with “ties of singular intimacy”—each country interpreted the
significance of his forecast in ways that were polar opposites.
For North Americans, Cuba became a neo-colony, a superficially sovereign
country whose politics were controlled by the White House, US Congress,
and US ambassador, and whose economic fortunes were controlled by US
companies. Within months of Tomás Estrada Palma’s inauguration as the
first president of Cuba, on May 20, 1902, he signed a reciprocal trade treaty
with the United States under which Cuban sugar and tobacco exports to the
United States received a 20 percent tariff reduction, and 497 categories of
US products exported to Cuba received tariff reductions that ranged from 20
to 40 percent.8 Thus began “independent” Cuba’s “special relationship” with
the United States. The preferential tariff for Cuban sugar essentially linked
Cuba’s main source of export earnings to a single buyer, the United States,
and the treaty opened the doors exclusively to US corporations to sell agri-
cultural and manufactured goods to Cuba at such low prices that they were
able to stifle the development of Cuban enterprises. The course of events gave
life to Martí’s admonition that Cuba needed to develop its own infrastructure:
“The nation that buys, commands. The nation that sells, serves. . . . Only a
nation that wishes to die will sell to a single nation. . . . The excessive influ-
ence of one nation on the commerce of another is quickly transformed into
political influence.”9
For Cubans, the “special relationship” led to a transformation of its culture.
A new elite emerged, based on its members’ connections to North America.
They sent their children to US universities and even high schools so that they
subsequently could take up management positions with US companies on the
island. As the Americanization of Cuba took hold in the twentieth century,
baseball became the national pastime, the use of US products conveyed a
sense of higher status, and soon anything American was deemed better than
anything Cuban.10
44 Chapter 5
While some Cubans heralded Estrada Palma’s assumption of the presi-

dency as the official end to the four-year US occupation, others protested
the legitimacy of his election. Key leaders of the 1895–1898 struggle—
notably General Máximo Gómez—refused to be candidates for the presidency
on grounds that the ballot had been rigged by the United States. There was
evidence for that charge: Governor-General Leonard Wood had appointed a
majority of the electoral commission that set the rules for the balloting and
then designated Estrada Palma as the preferred candidate.
The new president had been an early independence leader and briefly even
the president of the rebel government during the Ten-Year War. He had been
living in exile for almost three decades, working as a schoolteacher in New
York, though he also was a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and
helped to obtain guns and ammunition for the fighters.
Unlike Martí, though, Estrada Palma had become a naturalized US citizen.
He accepted the Platt Amendment’s legitimacy and pledged that US troops
would be welcome to return if they were needed to maintain order. Educated
at Columbia University, Estrada Palma was a member of the Cuban bicultural
elite who traveled freely and easily between the island and the United States.11
As journalist Richard Gott notes, “American intervention in Cuban affairs
was not an insult for such people; they welcomed it, and often requested it.”12
Such members of the Cuban elite, along with North Americans who had
settled in the country and others who obtained semipermanent residency sta-
tus because of their commercial interests, fully expected that the Roosevelt
administration would provide a safe climate for them. US corporations and
citizens were coming to the country in increasing numbers, and they saw no
way to guarantee their investments without the security umbrella a potential
US intervention provided.
A Kleptocracy Emerges
Cuba under Estrada Palma amounted to a kleptocracy. While he was able to
assuage the fears of US investors, the new president established a climate of
corruption. The public payroll expanded by thousands as senior members of
the new government used public funds for patronage as a way to build their
own fiefdoms. Estrada Palma knew that staying in office meant maintaining
strong, positive ties with the United States, and US companies assumed pri-
mary control over banking, land development, and construction. For example,
the North American Trust Company of New York, which had been the fiscal
agent for the US occupation forces, reorganized itself as Cuba’s Central Bank.
In July 1903, Estrada Palma signed a treaty with the United States that
paved the way for the construction of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in
southeastern Cuba. Six months later, on December 10, 1903, he stood with
Roosevelt at the ceremony marking the formal transfer of control over the
base to the United States.13 But no other high-ranking Cubans attended.
Cubans close to Estrada Palma, meanwhile, were not the only ones taking
advantage of the friendly business climate and largesse of the new govern-
ment. By 1905, 13,000 North Americans had acquired titles to land in Cuba.
Five years later, US companies and individuals owned about 60 percent of all
available rural properties on the island.14
In 1900, a group of US and Canadian corporate moguls formed the Cuba
Company to undertake the largest foreign investment project in Cuban his-
tory, a 350-mile rail line between Santa Clara and Santiago. Based in New
Jersey because of the state’s lax restrictions on corporations, the firm was the
brainchild of Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, a Canadian railroad baron
who recruited other wealthy investors, including former Secretary of State
William R. Day, US railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, and Levi Morton, a for-
mer governor of New York.15 The Cuba Company acquired thousands of acres
of land on the Santa Clara-Santiago route and around railroad stations. By
1915, the Cuba Company was the largest single foreign investor and largest
company in the country. Historian Juan Santamarina asserts that by forging
informal networks among US and Cuban businessmen and government of-
ficials, it established “the framework for US investment in Cuba that funda-
mentally influenced Cuba’s economic, political, and social development.”16
Spanish émigrés also were active in the rush to Cuba. The population
of white Spaniards tripled between 1899 and 1920, from about 100,000 to
300,000. New investments by US companies, particularly in eastern Oriente
Province, attracted those from poorer, rural areas of Spain with the hope of
jobs and even property ownership. One typical Spaniard who came to Cuba
during the period was Ángel Castro, who fought for the Spanish in the Inde-
pendence War, then returned to his home in Galicia.17
When he came back to Cuba around 1904, he first worked as a laborer for the
United Fruit Company and then took out a loan to establish a midsized planta-
tion in Oriente. Castro had two children with his first wife, fell in love with a
young servant, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, and had seven children with her, including
three sons: Ramón, born in 1924; Fidel, in 1926; and Raúl, in 1931.18
As foreigners bought land, the remnants of the original Cuban landown-
ing class—the criollas—were overshadowed by the foreigners’ presence and
tended to fall into line with US economic control. It was the final step in ced-
ing political and economic power and Cuban sovereignty to interests totally
enmeshed with the United States.
While Estrada Palma had taken office as a nonpartisan, he soon aligned
himself with the more conservative Republican Party and used their control
46 Chapter 5
of local politics throughout the country to protect his chances for reelection.
Together Estrada Palma and the Republicans proved more adept at voter fraud
than their opponents, the National Liberal Party, and the Republicans estab-
lished a majority in Cuba’s first congressional elections, held in February 1904.
Fraud was also widespread in Estrada Palma’s successful and unopposed re-
election bid in 1905. The Liberals were so outmatched that they withdrew from
the balloting. They then organized a 4,000-member army and a Central Revo-
lutionary Committee dedicated to overthrowing the Estrada Palma government.
The Liberals began the revolt in August 1906 with a series of small attacks
as they marched toward Havana. The Cuban army of only 3,000 troops was
unable to quell the insurrection, and Estrada Palma asked the United States
to intervene under the Platt Amendment. President Roosevelt, however, had
to contend with opposition at home to what was being called gunboat diplo-
macy, and he hesitated to intervene.
Instead, the president dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft,
whom Roosevelt was already promoting as his successor, and instructed him
to find a political compromise to end the spreading Liberal revolt. In private,
Roosevelt railed: “I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that
I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All that we wanted
was that they should behave themselves. . . . And now, lo and behold . . . we
have no alternative [but] to intervene.”19
US TROOPS RETURN TO CUBA
Magoon’s “Reforms”
By September 21, 1906, Taft had determined that Estrada Palma could not
withstand the rebellion, that negotiations were futile, and that military inter-
vention was the only alternative. The Cuban president resigned on September
28, and Roosevelt sent the first 2,000 of an eventual 5,000-member US oc-
cupation force that would remain on the island for three years. Today Estrada
Palma’s tenure in office is reviled in Cuba. A statue that had commemorated
his presidency was toppled from its pedestal and carted away after the 1959
Cuban revolution.
Once the reluctant decision had been made, the United States moved to as-
sume full economic and political control of the island. Roosevelt chose Charles
Magoon as the new governor general. Magoon was a lawyer and diplomat who
had served as the colonial governor of the recently acquired Panama Canal
Zone, and Roosevelt viewed him as an adept administrator. With a charge from
Roosevelt to clean up Cuba, Magoon ousted both the ministry officials who
had benefited most from cronyism under Estrada Palma and the Republican
Party government bureaucracy. Members of the Liberal Party took their place
and received key patronage jobs of their own. Magoon, meanwhile, expanded
the size of the army, established a professional civil service, and initiated major
public works programs, including a road expansion program.
Yet Cubans today characterize Magoon as a master of US treachery and
domination. While he carried out Roosevelt’s policies without benefiting
himself—unlike many other Americans—during his three-year rule there was
no semblance of self-determination in Cuba. Under Magoon’s direction, the
1908 election led to the victory of Liberals José Miguel Gómez as president
and Alfredo Zayas as vice president. The two had withdrawn from the 1905
election after objecting to corruption and violence during the campaign, and
their rise to power comforted US officials. Satisfied that he had reformed the
government and created a new system friendlier than ever to US interests,
President Taft withdrew the occupation forces in 1909.
US corporations fared even better than Liberal Party operatives during
the occupation—they won broad concessions for doing business on the
island, including subsidies for US-owned Cuban businesses. This changing
landscape of Cuba’s economy also affected Cuban values. As was often the
case under colonial rule, so too under neocolonialism, people in the depen-
dent country shaped their aspirations in accord with the mother country.
Cuban tastes also began to reflect those of the United States as US-based
companies determined the architecture of new buildings, wealthy Ameri-
cans defined what passed for high fashion, and even popular foods began
to reflect the preferences of North Americans.20
Sugar Reinforces Neo-Colonization

Above all other ties, the Cuban sugar industry was the dominant factor in US
planning, decision-making, and economic and political influence. The largest
sugar producer, the Cuba Cane Sugar Company, was founded in 1915 by US
bankers who were eager to profit from the shortages created by World War I.
The company’s investors came into the business at the right time—the price
of sugar increased more than 600 percent in five years, from three cents to
twenty cents per pound during World War I.
The Cuba Cane Sugar Company and its competitors were regulated by
US-dominated Cuban officials. While the Cuban government formally or-
ganized the hiring for the sugar mills, the survival of both the mills and the
workers depended on decisions made in Washington. To protect domestic
cane and beet sugar owners, the United States had established a quota on
imported sugar that determined how much and under what terms foreign
sugar could be sold.
48 Chapter 5
Moreover, sugar was produced in centrales, essentially company towns

that fostered vertical integration, which gave a company total control over
the lives of sugar workers. It also gave sugar companies an incentive to seek
cooperative arrangements with other major industries. Before long, US bank-
ers and industrialists were running interlocking companies in Cuba, sat on the
boards of more than one company, and effectively controlled most aspects
of Cuba’s economy. Successive Cuban governments, as well as the US oc-
cupation authorities, also had granted so much control of iron mining on the
island to US firms that they owned nearly all the mines. All of Cuba’s railroad
companies had a majority US ownership and interlocking directorates with
key US financial institutions. A hallmark of Cuba’s economy—tobacco—also
fell under US domination. The Tobacco Trust, a New Jersey–based corpora-
tion, controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s cigar and cigarette business after 1902.21
With the flood of US investments, there was little chance for the develop-
ment of a homegrown manufacturing sector in Cuba. North Americans deter-
mined what Cuba would produce, and they did not want the island’s products
competing with those made in the United States. Their decisions insured that
the Cuban economy would remain underdeveloped as a monoculture depen-
dent on sugar exports to the United States.
Indeed, the US sugar quota determined the health of Cuba’s economy
and the survival of workers well beyond the sugar industry, and US politics
became a key factor in Cuban development. For example, Cuba had the po-
tential of developing a commercial tomato and catsup business for domestic
consumption and even export. But the island was forced to import both the
fruit and the manufactured product from the United States in order to placate
members of the US Congress representing farming districts.
The system worked well enough to avoid widespread opposition only as
long as sugar was in demand at a decent price. That was the situation for a
seven-year period starting with World War I, when sugar beets were unavail-
able. Cane sugar prices rose from 1.9 cents per pound in 1914 to 22.5 cents
in 1920, a year dubbed “the dance of the millions.” But within months of its
zenith, the market plummeted back to old levels, below four cents per pound,
which led to the collapse of the Cuban banking system in June 1921.22
THE RISE OF THE MACHADO DICTATORSHIP
Depression in the Early 1920s

Alfredo Zayas had been elected president seven months earlier on a platform
that opposed US intervention. But his opponent disputed the election’s va-
lidity, throwing the government into a stalemate. It was precisely the kind
of circumstance that previously had led the United States to intervene, and
in January 1921 President Woodrow Wilson dispatched General Enoch H.
Crowder to Havana aboard the USS Minnesota.23 But Wilson ordered him not
to intervene. Instead, Crowder took on the role of mediator to help resolve the
election dispute. He then stayed in Cuba another two years as US ambassador
and de facto consul general. Crowder effectively ruled over President Zayas,
who was powerless in the face of the financial disaster, and even named the
key government ministers.
With nearly all of its banks failing, Cuba was forced to seek emergency
help from US financial institutions, but they refused. Reluctantly Cuba turned
to the US government, which provided a major loan under terms that enabled
US banks and investors to gain further control of the island’s affairs.
Meanwhile, the economic turmoil caused many Cubans to lose their jobs,
and those who still had employment faced rising prices on food and most
goods. The loss of revenue brought even more unemployment as govern-
ment shortfalls forced cuts in patronage jobs. As a result, trade unions gained
strength and worker militancy increased in the early 1920s.24
In 1922, students at the University of Havana began to engage in political
action. Taking inspiration from students at Argentina’s University of Cór-
doba, they demanded autonomy for the university, the removal of corrupt pro-
fessors, and an end to US intervention. After students took over the university
forcibly in 1923, Zayas gave in to most of their demands, and the government
gave official recognition to the Federation of University Students (FEU is the
Spanish acronym). Julio Antonio Mella, head of the FEU, became a founder
of the Cuban Communist Party in 1925. At the same time, calls for suffrage
from a nascent women’s movement grew more fervent and crystallized in the
first meeting of the National Congress of Women in 1923.25
Although Zayas had inherited the economic recession and the rampant gov-
ernment corruption, Cubans blamed him for the continuation of hard times. In
the 1924 general elections, they turned to Gerardo Machado y Morales, a man
of few political accomplishments though a wily self-promoter. He had been a
minor general in the Cuban War for Independence, mayor of Santa Clara, and
a government minister. But in the preceding quarter century, he also had found
ways to become wealthy, owning two newspapers, a bank, a sugar mill, and a
construction company. These credentials assuaged concerns US officials might
have had about his campaign “platform of regeneration.”
Enter the “Tropical Mussolini”

Machado pledged to restore the economy, to build schools and roads, to ex-
pand social services, and to replace patronage with a modern civil service. In
50 Chapter 5
fact, he did attempt to promote new industries and to diversify agricultural

production, and he enacted a tariff law that provided protection that domestic
businesses had sought. He also initiated major construction projects that re-
duced unemployment in between sugar harvests—including a new building in
Havana for the seat of government that replicates Paris’s Pantheon and bears
a resemblance to the US Capitol. Yet the overall economy still depended on
sugar, a weak pillar on which to base recovery and growth. Although Cuba at-
tracted an increasing number of Prohibition-era US tourists who could satisfy
their thirst with the island’s rum, the low price for sugar brought a depression
to Cuba even before the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash.26
Cuban presidents, like those throughout Latin America at the time, were
limited to one term in office. But Machado had dictatorial ambitions and
initially sought to extend his term of office by two years without a new elec-
tion. The Cuban Congress wavered in deciding among several constitutional
proposals to change the presidential term, and finally approved a new process
that would create a single six-year term for the president and allow Machado
to run for the office in 1928.
Given the state of the economy, Machado sought to avoid a meaningful
campaign. Under the banner of cooperativismo, the “tropical Mussolini”—as
student leader Mella called him—relied on ties he created between business
and government to maneuver the Liberal and Republican parties to nominate
him so that he could be elected by acclamation. At the same time, he gained
support from US investors by pushing a law through the Cuban Congress that
allowed the foreign entities dominating Cuba’s electricity and transportation
companies to seize land and property from both the Cuban state and private
citizens for the purpose of expanding services.27
But then calamity struck. The US economic depression hit Cuba espe-
cially hard. Consider that from 1929 to 1932 annual sugar earnings de-
clined from $200 million to $40 million. When demonstrations escalated
and turned violent in 1930, Machado responded with waves of attacks on
the protesters. Meanwhile, behind the demonstrators, a new generation of
leaders organized the University Student Directory (DEU is the Spanish
acronym) and plotted to oust Machado along with what they viewed as his
illegitimate government.
Original members of the DEU—later nicknamed the “Generation of
1930”—included Carlos Prío Socarrás (Cuban president from 1948 to
1952), Raúl Roa Kouri (foreign minister from 1959 to 1976), and Eduardo
Chíbas (founder of the Ortodoxo Party and a mentor to Fidel Castro). As a
physiology professor at the University of Havana, Ramón Grau San Martín
(Cuban president from 1944 to 1948) was not eligible to join the DEU but
served as an adviser.28
THE 1933 REVOLUTION
“Good Neighbor” Intervention

Cuba’s political turmoil was occurring just as US policy toward Latin Amer-
ica was changing. Shortly after his election in 1928, President-elect Herbert
Hoover began a two-month tour of the region. Aimed at recasting the unfa-
vorable image that the United States had acquired during the prior thirty years
of intervention, he frequently used the term “good neighbor.”29
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked up the theme in his first in-
augural address, pledging to “dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good
neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does
so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations
and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neigh-
bors.”30 The new US policy gave hope to Machado’s opponents that Roo
sevelt was sincere and would not invoke the Platt Amendment to intervene.
But US investors, who watched Cuba’s economic collapse and dysfunc-
tional government wreak havoc on their profits, pressured the new American
leader through their high-level access. Two members of Roosevelt’s infor-
mal group of academic advisers, the “Brain Trust,” had been president and
vice president of the American Molasses Company, which had holdings in
Cuba. A third member was on the company’s board of directors. Three of the
president’s cabinet nominees also had various connections to companies with
economic interests in Cuba.31
Machado’s brutality provided an additional impetus for intervention. Roo-
sevelt confidant Sumner Welles reported that it involved daily occurrences of
“governmental murder and clandestine assassination.”32 Yet Roosevelt was
determined not to send in troops. With a regionwide meeting scheduled for
late 1933, Roosevelt wanted to avoid a repeat of the criticism Latin Ameri-
cans had heaped on the United States at a 1928 conference. Instead he sent
Welles as ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Cuba. Arriving in
May 1933, the new envoy sought to calm the waters by offering Machado
some “friendly advice”—restore constitutional rule and resign as president.33
Machado refused to budge.
Welles persisted with his efforts at “mediation,” encouraging the estab-
lished moderate opposition and some minor groups to challenge Machado.
The dictator responded by ending press censorship and pushing a general
amnesty law through the Cuban Congress. But he refused to resign and wide-
spread protests continued. In July 1933, after police bloodied striking Havana
bus drivers, sympathy strikes began to erupt. The next month these escalated
into a paralyzing general strike. Welles’s patience had run out. He threatened
that the United States would cease to recognize the legitimacy of the Cuban
52 Chapter 5
government and demanded Machado step down.34 As a replacement Welles

proposed Cuba’s recently resigned ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Manuel de
Céspedes y Quesada, a man well known in Washington as a reliable ally of
US business interests.35 An apolitical diplomat and son of the 1868 revolu-
tionary Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Welles’s choice was innocuous enough
to be palatable to all sides.36
With the United States having discarded the pretense of being a neutral me-
diator, army generals opted to abandon Machado, ousting him in a coup d’etat
on August 12. Welles then maneuvered behind the scenes for the military
to name Céspedes as secretary of state and then for the Cuban Congress to
amend the constitution, making the secretary of state the interim president in
case of a vacancy. Céspedes was sworn in as Cuba’s new leader on August 13.
The US press hailed him as Cuba’s savior and praised Welles for his skill-
ful diplomacy. But Céspedes had little legitimacy inside Cuba. Unaffiliated
with a party, he had no political base. He also retained Machado’s discredited
1928 constituent assembly and he offered no program for meaningful change.
Within a month, a group of unlikely revolutionaries had deposed him from
the presidency.
The One-Hundred-Day Government

Late on September 3, sergeants, corporals, and enlistees stationed at Camp
Columbia, a base outside Havana, met to finalize a list of grievances against
their senior officers—better pay, increased opportunities for promotion, and
better living conditions. When the officers in charge dismissed the demands
out of hand, members of this “Sergeants’ Revolt” grew even angrier. Seizing
control of the camp, they arrested their former superiors and by the end of
September 4 controlled all of Havana’s military garrisons. Their insurrection
quickly spread to all the bases throughout the island.
As news of the mutiny leaked out early on September 4, DEU leaders
rushed to Camp Columbia, imploring the mutineers to expand their nar-
row demands into a revolt against the Céspedes government. Faced with
the likelihood of severe punishments by the government if they allowed
it to stay in power, the soldiers joined forces with the civilians to topple
Céspedes, who closed down the provisional government on September 5.
Five days later, the coalition established a ruling junta and named Grau San
Martín president of the provisional revolutionary government. It was now
backed by the military under the direction of Fulgencio Batista, one of the
Sergeants’ Revolt leaders.37
The revolutionary government drew up a new constitution that included
many of the political reforms the DEU had advocated in its “Manifesto-
Program to the Cuban People.”38 It also enacted land reforms that limited the
size of the farm a family could own, labor reforms that included an eight-hour
workday and a minimum wage, and a law that required at least 50 percent of
the workers of any company to be Cuban.
Implementing such far-reaching plans was easier said than done. The Grau
government lacked internal cohesion because the single cause that united the
DEU and the military had been their opposition to Machado. Meanwhile,
Washington refused to recognize the government and sent warships off the
Cuban coast, stopping just short of intervention. When Roosevelt denied
Welles’s request for troops, the ambassador began a relentless campaign of
subversion. Reinforced by US nonrecognition of the government, he pres-
sured moderates to refuse negotiations with Grau, encouraged former senior
military officers to boycott the army, and wooed Batista away from the coali-
tion. Vice President Antonio Guiteras, an ardent anti-imperialist, derided the
deserters as “servants” of the United States.39
In one of its final acts of defiance, the government nationalized the Cuban
Electric Company, which was owned by General Electric through several
subsidiaries such as American and Foreign Power, and two mills owned by
the Cuban American Sugar Corporation.40 Then, on January 15, 1934, Grau
and the members of his 100-day regime resigned. Batista chose Colonel Car-
los Mendieta to be the new president. But the wily sergeant was the principal
player the Roosevelt administration trusted and through whom it reasserted
US direction over Cuban politics during the next six years. Notably, Roo
sevelt was not the only North American who found Batista to be a useful
ally. In 1933, the former sergeant held his first meeting with Meyer Lansky,
the American mobster who viewed Cuba as a future home for his growing
nefarious enterprises.
As a gesture of good neighborliness, Roosevelt then abrogated the hated
Platt Amendment. But his administration negotiated a new agreement for
the 45-square-mile Guantánamo naval base. Under the original accord, the
United States could lease the base for 99 years. The 1934 pact provided for
a lease that could be held in perpetuity, or until both sides agreed to end it.41
Each year, the United States sends Cuba a check of about $4,000 in payment
on the lease. The Cuban government cashed the first check in 1959, but since
then it has refused to do so, not wanting to legitimate US occupation of the
territory. The funds are held in an escrow account at a New York bank.
NOTES
1. Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of US Policy toward Latin
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 145.
54 Chapter 5
2. Le Riverend, Economic History of Cuba, 206.

3. Pérez, Cuba, 156–59; Benjamin, The United States and Cuba, 9–10.
4. Pérez, Cuba, 145–46.
6. Orville H. Platt, “The Pacification of Cuba,” Independent, June 27, 1901.
7. Office of the Historian, US State Department, “MILESTONES: 1899–1913:
The United States, Cuba, and the Platt Amendment, 1901,” accessed December 30,
2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/platt. On May 9, 2017, the State
Department “retired” this account and now makes no reference to the Platt Amend-
ment except to say that the United States abrogated the terms of the amendment in
1934 under the Good Neighbor policy. Accessed May 22, 2017, https://history.state
.gov/milestones/1921-1936/good-neighbor.
8. Jorge Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution: Cuba, 1898–1958 (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 1998), 17.
9. José Martí, “The Monetary Conference of the American Republics (1891),”
in José Martí: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin,
2002), 307.
10. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7, 157.
11. Gott, Cuba, 92, 94.
12. Gott, Cuba, 114.
13. Stephen Irving Max Schwab, Guantánamo, USA: The Untold History of
America’s Cuban Outpost (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009), 94.
14. Gott, Cuba, 115
15. Juan C. Santamarina, “The Cuba Company and the Expansion of American
Business in Cuba, 1898–1915,” Business History Review 74 (Spring 2000): 41–42.
16. Santamarina, “The Cuba Company,” 42.
17. The account here of Ángel Castro’s return to Cuba is the one most commonly
reported, though there are biographies with conflicting details. Hugh Thomas (Cuba:
The Pursuit of Freedom [New York: Harper & Row, 1971], 803–4) and Robert E.
Quirk (Fidel Castro [New York: Norton, 1993], 9) assert that Fidel’s father did not
return to Spain after the 1898 war.
18. Fidel Castro’s official birthdate was August 13, 1926. However, according to
journalist Claudia Furiati, he was born in 1927. She asserts that his father changed
Fidel’s birth certificate making him seem one year older so that he could enroll in el
Colégio Belén. Claudia Furiati, Fidel Castro: Uma biografia consentida, 3a Edição
(Rio de Janeiro: Editora Revan, 2001), 53–54.
20. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 7, 157.
21. “Tobacco Trust in Cuba,” New York Times, May 29, 1902.
22. Pérez, Cuba, 176–77.
23. “President Sends Crowder to Cuba to Study Crisis,” New York Times, January
4, 1921, 1.
25. Oscar Zanetti Leucuna, Historia Mínima de Cuba (Mexico City: El Colegio de
México, 2013), chapter 7.
26. Luis E. Aguilar, Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution (New York: Norton,
1972), chapter 5.
27. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 64.
28. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, chapter 9; Gott, Cuba, 133–34.
29. Schoultz, Beneath the United States, 290.
30. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, accessed
June 8, 2014, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp.
31. Robert F. Smith, The United States and Cuba: Business and Diplomacy,
1917–1960 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1961), 142–43.
32. As quoted in Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 129.
33. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 131.
34. Smith, The United States and Cuba, 146–47.
35. J. D. Phillips, “Machado ‘Leave’ Sought by Welles as Cuban Solution: Ambas-
sador Suggests Naming a New State Secretary Who Would Succeed President. Execu-
tive Bars Quitting . . . Toll of Rioting Now 30,” New York Times, August 9, 1933, 1.
36. “Céspedes Served Country as Envoy,” New York Times, August 13, 1933, 23.
Céspedes also served twice as Cuba’s ambassador to the United States and France and
secretary of state during the first year of Machado’s presidency.
37. Pérez, Cuba, 208; Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 159–62.
38. Aguilar, Cuba 1933, 157–59.
39. Antonio Guiteras, “Septembrismo,” reprinted in La Jiribilla: Revista Digi-
tal de Cultura Cubana, no. 290, 25 de noviembre al primero de diciembre, 2006
(translation by the authors), accessed June 29, 2014, http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2006/
n290_11/290_07.html.
40. José A. Gómez-Ibáñez, Regulating Infrastructure: Monopoly, Contracts, and
Discretion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 123–24.
41. Schwab, Guantánamo, USA, 134–36.
Chapter 6
Playground of the Western World

and the Rise of Batista, 1934–1958
Dirt shacks, no running water—the way those people lived, it’s just how
life was to me. I was a child. Mother didn’t like it, but Daddy reminded her
that the company paid them higher wages than any Cuban-owned sugar
operation. Mother thought it was just terrible the way the Cuban planta-
tions did business. It broke her heart, the idea of a race of people exploit-
ing their own kind. The cane cutters were all Jamaicans, of course—not a
single one of them was Cuban—but I knew what she meant: native people
taking advantage of other native people, brown against black, that kind
of thing. She was proud of Daddy; proud of the fact that the United Fruit
Company upheld a certain standard, paid better wages than they had to,
just to be decent. She said she hoped it would influence the Cubans to treat
their own kind a bit better.
—Rachel Kushner1
THE 1940 REPUBLIC
Batista Wins 1940 Election

Along with a new constitution that had been hammered out in about four
months and completed by a constituent assembly in June, the 1940 elec-
tion gave Colonel Fulgencio Batista’s presidency a patina of democratic le-
gitimacy. Batista had resigned from the military to campaign in the election.
Conveniently, the constituent assembly exempted him from a provision that
required a candidate to have been out of the military for at least one year prior
to assuming the presidency.
Not only was Batista the leading candidate; for a time, he also was the only
presidential candidate. In order to increase popular acceptance of the outcome,
56
Playground of the Western World and the Rise of Batista, 1934–1958 57
Batista asked Grau San Martín—who had returned from six years of exile in
the United States—to run. Batista garnered more than 40 percent of the vote.
With a kind of New Deal, social democratic program, the new president
emphasized economic and agricultural reforms that he had promoted as mili-
tary leader after the 1933 coup. He also nurtured Cuban ties with the United
States, and imports of US products increased from about half to about three-
quarters of all of Cuba’s imports between 1933 and 1940.2
Perhaps more important, Cuban-US economic relations were shaped by
two 1934 US laws. Under the Jones-Costigan Act, the US secretary of ag-
riculture set a quota each year for foreign sugar producers. The percentage
of the total allotted to each country was based on its average percentage of
sugar sales to the United States from 1931 to 1933. This was unfortunate for
Cuba, because its exports in those years hit historic lows. In theory, this cir-
cumstance might have enabled Cuba to diversify its dependency by trading
more with Europe. But the other law, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act,
enabled the Roosevelt administration to “negotiate” an accord with Cuba that
reduced tariffs significantly for US products and thus made European prod-
ucts uncompetitive. Taken together, the two laws ensured that Cuba would
remain dependent on the United States and relatively poor.
Notably, the presidential-like residence of the US ambassador in Havana
symbolized US-Cuban relations before 1959 (see figures 6.1 and 6.2). Built
in 1942, the sixty-five-room estate still sits on 5.25 acres in what had been a
wealthy Havana suburb. Its sculpted gardens are punctuated by baroque foun-
tains and sit adjacent to a large swimming pool and tennis courts.3
Figure 6.1. Entrance to the sixty-five-room residence of the US ambassador.

Photo by Carlos A. Ortega Murias.
58 Chapter 6
Figure 6.2. Dining room in the residence of the US ambassador. Photo by Philip Brenner.
A Reliable US Ally in World War II

As World War II approached, Batista swore “whole-hearted” allegiance to the
Allies. He told foreign correspondents before the presidential campaign that
“Cuba desires and hopes to maintain her neutrality . . . but the United States
can count on us as a factor in its plans for the defense of the Caribbean.”4 In-
deed, the Roosevelt administration was certain that the new Cuban president
was a solid, dependable ally who would protect US interests.
Even before Batista was inaugurated on October 10, 1940, Cuba played
an ignominious role in the lead-up to the war. The Nazi German government
allowed a vessel of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the SS St. Louis, to leave
Germany bound for Cuba with 938 passengers, virtually all of them escap-
ing Jews. The ship anchored in Havana harbor on May 27, 1939. But Nazi
spies and corrupt Cuban officials—combined with ineffective efforts by US
diplomats—blocked the passengers from disembarking. It became known
as the Voyage of the Damned. The vessel sailed next toward Florida, but
President Roosevelt chose not to expand immigration quotas as he contended
with isolationists, anti-Semites in Congress, and public opinion hostile to
increasing immigration. The St. Louis returned to Europe, where US officials
quietly tried to arrange for the passengers’ safety. Some received asylum in
Britain. But those sent to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands soon found
themselves again in German hands when the German blitzkrieg overtook
those countries in 1940.5
Batista’s governing alliance, which included support from the Cuban
Communist Party, focused on good relations with labor unions in the cities,
the creation of local health centers, and a number of political reforms. Two
prominent members of the communist party even served for a time in Ba-
tista’s national unity cabinet. One was Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, who became
Cuba’s vice president in 1976; the other was Blas Roca, who would become
a key strategist in the revolutionary government two decades later.
The war had a positive effect on a few sectors of Cuba’s economy but
negative effects on most. Between 1940 and 1944, the disparity between the
urban working and the rural poor increased. Trade with Europe essentially
stopped when maritime commerce collapsed, and the number of tourists
overall dropped by 90 percent. Cuba’s only safe and reliable trade partner
was just north across the Florida Straits. With the resulting dependence on
the US market, Cuba’s trade deficit with the United States grew and so did
US domination of Cuban industry and commerce.6 Meanwhile, the US Navy
used Cuban port facilities for secure transit of military supplies.
As the 1944 election loomed, Batista’s only hope of maintaining some
power resided with his prime minister, Carlos Saladrigas, because the 1940
constitution did not permit consecutive presidential terms. Although Batista
threw his support behind Saladrigas, voters swept Grau San Martín into
office in a landslide victory. Grau, the ousted president of the one-hundred-
day revolutionary government and candidate of the Auténtico Party, was a
much different man from the firebrand who left the country in 1934. This
60 Chapter 6
time around he was determined to cater to US interests. He reduced taxes

on foreign investment and foreign corporations operating in Cuba, and less-
ened restraints on US businesses operating on the island. He also removed
Communist Party members from the government and repressed their labor
organizations. (During the war, the Communist Party changed its name to the
Popular Socialist Party [PSP].)
A FAÇADE OF PROSPERITY
After World War II, sugar maintained its position as the bedrock of the
economy. By 1948, sugar production had risen to a new high of 5.8 million
tons and accounted for 90 percent of Cuba’s export earnings.7 In addition, the
tourism and cigar industries started to take off as Cuba’s economic profile
began to evolve.
US businessmen also sought to capitalize on the island’s proximity and
friendly business climate. Standard Oil of New Jersey (then known as Esso
and now ExxonMobil) and Texaco established refineries on the island
and shipped the output to the rest of the Caribbean basin. Havana became
the regional sales headquarters for the hemispheric operations of several
companies and advertising agencies. As the number of visitors began to
increase, Cuban officials proudly announced an investment of $5 million to
make further improvements in tourist facilities.8
Unfortunately, the surface appearance of a thriving economy masked a
problematic core. Starting with Grau, presidents padded the government pay-
roll with Auténtico Party patronage seekers who had been previously shut out
of public jobs. Corruption grew in the postwar years, making a few Cubans
wealthy and helping American businesses gain an even more secure foothold.
Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had been Grau’s prime minister, won the 1948
election for president. Known as the “cordial president,” he demonstrated little
intention or ability to control the increasing US business domination of Cuba’s
economy, which returned only meager sustenance to it. Moreover, in order to
forestall any trouble from Washington, Prío continued Grau’s practice of sys-
tematically removing PSP members from the Cuban labor movement, which
vitiated the energy of some of the unions that were most effective.
This did not stop workers from striking for better wages and conditions.
The Ministry of Labor reported 102 strikes and hundreds of disputes involv-
ing workers and businesses between January and August 1951. There were
also spontaneous demonstrations, some of which turned violent. In rampages
that involved looting and even murder, rival “action groups” became as much
criminal street gangs as political organizations.
Widespread impunity for such actions had an effect on Cuba’s economic

climate, which raised concerns among American business leaders. “Despite
the country’s prosperity and its manifest opportunities for investment, only
a few new industries have been established by local capital during the last
few years,” the New York Times reported in January 1952. It added that “the
National Association of Industrialists repeatedly has warned the Government
that economic development cannot be carried out until relations between
capital and labor are stabilized.”9
Political scientist Jorge Domínguez well describes a pervasive feeling
throughout the island by 1951 that the Cuban political “system was somehow
not legitimate.” The constitution, he explained, “was honored in the breach”;
presidents bypassed Congress and the Supreme Court; “corruption was per-
vasive.”10 Only Senator Eduardo Chibás, the founder of the Ortodoxo Party,
had been able to arouse popular hopes. Although Chibás had lost to Prío in the
1948 election, he was untarnished by scandal. With a passionate eloquence,
he appeared every Sunday on the radio to rail against President Prío and
government corruption.
On August 5, 1951, Chibás opened his live broadcast by denouncing
Prío as the most corrupt president in Cuban history, and he finished with
an appeal: “Last Sunday . . . I presented to the people irrefutable proof of
the immense corruption within Prío’s regime. . . . But my wake-up call
perhaps was not strong enough. . . . People of Cuba, wake up! This is the
final wake-up call!”11
He then took out a gun, shot himself in the stomach, and died eleven
days later.
BATISTA RETURNS WITH MARTIAL LAW
The dramatic suicide provided Batista with the opportunity he sought when
he returned to Cuba from Florida in 1950. But the depth of his unpopularity in
the 1952 presidential election was evident from poll data. Batista was in third
place despite the lack of enthusiasm the other candidates inspired. Roberto
Agramonte y Pichardo, a mild-mannered psychology professor at the Univer-
sity of Havana and conventional Ortodoxo functionary, had replaced Chibás
as the party’s standard bearer and was running neck and neck with Carlos
Hevía, the Auténtico candidate.12 Counting on the public’s disdain for the
political system, Batista engaged disaffected junior military officers to stage
a coup three months before the scheduled June vote. Declaring martial law,
he shut down Congress and canceled the elections. Prío fled to Mexico City
and then to Miami, where he spent the rest of his days. One of the Ortodoxo
62 Chapter 6
candidates seeking a seat in the House of Representatives was Fidel Castro

Ruz, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had been favored to win.
Nearly twenty years after his first taste of power, Batista was back in
office. But his military takeover was not popular and he governed with an
unyielding hand and brutal force. Reports of human rights violations soon
became abundant as opposition to the new regime arose quickly. University
students and other opponents tried to mobilize popular anger by staging a
general strike, and some later plotted with dissident army officers to stage a
countercoup. The government discovered the plans, jailed plot leader Profes-
sor Rafael Garcia Barcena along with more than one hundred others, and sent
several others into exile.13
Batista’s coup had not fazed Washington, which recognized the new gov-
ernment seventeen days after the former president seized power. But the
United States conditioned approval on three demands, which Batista easily
satisfied: a clampdown on open activity by communists, the pledge of a
favorable climate for US investors, and the promise of elections in the near
future. Cleverly, one of Batista’s first acts was to break Cuba’s diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union.14 In a November 1954 presidential election,
Batista ran unopposed. He won handily.
If there were any concerns in Washington about his iron rule, Batista as-
suaged them by frequently restating his government’s basic anti-communist
stance. On the second anniversary of his coup, for example, he emphasized
three key themes—anti-communism, stability, and elections. “We remain
firm in our aim to preserve order and to solve the political problem of
Cuba by electoral means,” he declared.15 As he spoke, soldiers and police
surrounded the University of Havana, smashing a student demonstration
against the regime.
With stability for foreign investment guaranteed, Batista moved on a
number of fronts in an effort to “modernize” Havana. US-managed hotels
flourished with attractive rates. Prominent among them were the Nacional
(see figure 6.3), the Sevilla Biltmore, and the Presidente. When the Rosita de
Hornedo (now called the Sierra Maestra) opened in 1955, it featured exclu-
sive prices for foreign high-rollers. Pan Am and Eastern Airlines established
frequent flights between Havana and New York, Chicago, and Miami. The
West India Fruit and Steamship Company expanded its passenger operations
in the early 1950s, offering passage for thousands of passengers and hundreds
of cars across the Florida Straits every day.
The government rushed to complete an international airport at Varadero
Beach, about ninety miles east of Havana on the northern Cuban coast. Even-
tually, the project included a highway that would link the cities, and officials
discussed plans to remake the quiet palm-tree retreat in the image of Miami
Figure 6.3. Hotel Nacional. Photo by Philip Brenner.
Beach. Honeymoon packages were promoted at top Havana hotels, and the
government designated special English-speaking tourist police to help Ameri-
cans get around the city. The goal was to convert Cuba into North America’s
winter playground.
PLAYGROUND OF THE WESTERN WORLD . . . FOR THE FEW
A Gangster’s Paradise
At the same time, Batista encouraged the growth of casino gambling. By the
end of 1955, all of the major hotels featured or were in the process of estab-
lishing posh gaming operations.16 The government charged gaming fees and
claimed that the greater part was distributed to charities, many of which were
managed by Batista’s wife, Marta Fernández de Batista. In reality, according
to journalist Ann Louise Bardach, “Batista was reported to be pocketing more
than $1 million from the gambling casinos every month and he maintained
Swiss bank accounts with deposits in the hundreds of millions.”17
From time to time, Batista made a show of policing the casinos’ “razzle-daz-
zle,” which is what they called the fleecing of American tourists at the gaming
tables. Early in his dictatorial rule, when the appearance of fixing threatened
64 Chapter 6
to undermine Cuba’s popularity with tourists, Batista pledged reforms and

designated one of the fixers as his special “adviser on gambling reform.” The
choice was Meyer Lansky, a linchpin for syndicates in New York, Chicago,
and Las Vegas, who had been operating in Cuba for at least a decade.18
In fact, on December 22, 1946, the chiefs of several prominent US orga-
nized crime syndicates had convened at Havana’s oceanside Hotel Nacional
and essentially divided up their opportunities for gambling, money launder-
ing, and related businesses. Among them were Lansky and Charles “Lucky”
Luciano, who had been a major Chicago underworld figure until his 1936
conviction for prostitution and racketeering. But in 1946, he was out of jail
because of his connections with gangsters who ruled the waterfront at key
US ports. The federal government had paroled Luciano from his long prison
sentence to assist US counterespionage efforts against German spies by re-
porting on the departure of troop transport ships during World War II. When
Cuba deported him to Italy in 1947, Santo Trafficante, Jr., the mob boss of
Tampa, took Luciano’s place. (In the 1960s, Trafficante would be involved in
US Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.19)
The gangsters went on a spending spree after Batista’s 1952 coup, opening
nightclubs and casinos and building a racetrack and new hotels. In 1957, Traffi-
cante unveiled the fourteen-story Hotel Deauville along Havana’s seaside road-
way, and Lansky opened the opulent Riviera. Costing $14 million, the Riviera’s
twenty-one floors housed 440 rooms, a casino, a cabaret, and two restaurants.
However, US organized crime in Cuba stayed away from sex traffick-
ing. As journalist T. J. English notes, “The trade never was as lucrative
as narcotics or gambling—businesses that tended to metastasize and cre-
ate other businesses.”20 Prostitution was left to Cuban entrepreneurs, who
made their own contribution to Havana’s reputation as a vice capital in the
Batista years. In the 1950s, prostitution was the second largest occupation
for women, after teaching.
With Batista in charge of the government, organized crime had found what
they believed was their paradise. Closer to New York and more pleasant than
Las Vegas, and with a friendly government that the crime bosses could con-
trol, Cuba provided a haven where the criminals imagined they could center
their worldwide operations with impunity. But they had not reckoned with
one factor that led to their undoing. Most of the people who lived in Cuba did
not benefit from either Batista’s rule or the mob’s exploitation.
The Other Cuba

Memories of Cuba’s wealth in the 1950s and myths about its advanced de-
velopment die hard. Exiles who left Cuba shortly after the 1959 revolution
have described for so long the comfortable lives they led that it has seemed to
many US listeners that comfort was the norm. In a 2012 meeting with former
US government officials visiting Havana, a recently arrived US diplomat
pointed to the former mansions near the US Interests Section (now the US
embassy) building and said that these were evidence that the revolution was
“not about poverty,” because there was “a lot of wealth” in the country.21
Superficially, the US diplomat was correct. In the 1950s, Cuba “was far
from underdeveloped when compared with much of the rest of the world,”
as political scientist Richard Fagen observed.22 Its per capita gross domestic
product was eighth in Latin America, ahead of Brazil’s. Its literacy rate was
76 percent, fourth best in the region.23 But Fagen added, “Aggregate statistics
do not, of course, tell the whole story. Despite the comforting averages and
national comparisons, Cuba was characterized by vast inequalities in the dis-
tribution of goods, services, and opportunities.”24
Consider that while only 26 percent of Cuba’s population lived in Havana,
the city had 60 percent of the country’s doctors and 62 percent of the dentists.
Havana had one hospital bed for every 195 inhabitants, but the eastern prov-
ince of Oriente had one bed per 1,870.25 The disparities in literacy and the
availability of schools between urban and rural areas were even more stark.
In 1956, only 50 percent of children between the ages of five and fourteen
attended school. The 1953 census revealed that 25 percent of the popula-
tion over ten years of age had never been to school.26 Sixty percent of the
country’s secondary schools were private, which made secondary education
unaffordable for most Cubans. Middle- and upper-class Cubans sent their
children to private schools or to the United States. In addition, as historian
Alejandro de la Fuente reports, “Some of the best schools in the country . . .
were American and open only to whites” and the best religious schools were
“Spanish and equally discriminatory.”27
Urban-rural contrasts were evident in housing, where 93 percent of rural
homes had no electricity. Agricultural workers also suffered from underem-
ployment. About one-quarter of Cuba’s total labor force worked only one
hundred days each year. And in the 1950s, as the Cuban economy stagnated
apart from the tourist sector, their wages dropped even further. Louis Pérez
explains, “A [sugar] worker who earned $5 daily in 1951 was earning $4.35
per day in 1955. . . . Workers in transportation, tobacco, henequen (a tropical
plant used to manufacture rope and twine), along with other manufacturing
sectors, similarly experienced an approximate 20 percent loss of wages dur-
ing these years.”28
Batista’s Cuba was in reality two distinct countries. One was distinguished
by the high-rolling, vice-ridden lifestyle of North American tourism in Ha-
vana, with its circles of Cubans dependent on that dominant industry and US
66 Chapter 6
corporations. The other was a country of abject poverty, economic stagnation,

and rural underemployment. Batista’s government did little to generate mean-
ingful development for the vast majority, and the resulting dissatisfaction and
disgust was spread throughout the country.
NOTES
1. Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2009), 11.
3. Rebecca C. Park, “Brief History of the US Residence and Eagle, Havana,
Cuba,” June 2005 (pamphlet; US Interests Section, Havana, Cuba).
4. “Cuban Aid Pledged to US if War Comes,” New York Times, May 23, 1940, 4.
5. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 2013), 125–41.
6. Pérez, Cuba, 220–21.
8. “Travel to Cuba Rises,” New York Times, January 3, 1951, 71.
9. “Unsettled Labor Frustrates Cuba,” New York Times, January 4, 1952, 64.
10. Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1978), 110.
11. “Eduardo R. Chibás: Last Speech,” trans. Walter Lippmann from a transcript
prepared by Raúl Chibás, July 31, 1982; original Spanish version available at http://
www.partidortodoxo.org/Aldabonazo.htm; English translation available at http://
www.walterlippmann.com/docs3896.html.
12. Domínguez, Cuba, 113.
13. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy,
second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 49.
15. “Batista Says Cuba Cleaned Out Reds,” New York Times, March 11, 1954, 5.
16. R. Hart Phillips, “Cuba Is Betting on Her New Gambling Casinos,” New York
Times, November 6, 1955.
17. Ann Louis Bardach, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and
Havana (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 245. Emphasis in the original.
18. T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba . . . and Then Lost
It to the Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 2007), 95–96, 132–33.
19. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Inspector General Report on Plots to Assas-
sinate Fidel Castro,” May 23, 1967, 25, 35, 104. Available at National Archives and
Records Administration, JFK Record Series; Record Number: 104-10213-10101; File
Number: JFK64-48 :F52 1998 .06 .23 .11 :39 :07 :420082.
20. English, Havana Nocturne, 168, 216. The quotation is taken from 216.
21. Philip Brenner attended the meeting.
22. Richard R. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1969), 22.
23. Luis Bértola and José Antonio Ocampo, The Economic Development of Latin
America since Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), table A.2; Car-
melo Mesa-Lago, “Economic and Social Balance of 50 Years of Cuban Revolution,”
in Cuba in Transition: Papers and Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of
the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 19 (2009: 377, http://
www.ascecuba.org/c/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/v19-mesolago.pdf.
24. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, 23.
25. Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 161.
26. Marvin Leiner, “Two Decades of Educational Change in Cuba,” Journal of
Reading 25, no. 3 (December 1981): 202–3; Fagen, The Transformation of Political
Culture in Cuba, 35.
27. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in
Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 145.
Chapter 7
The Revolutionary Struggle, 1953–1958
In terms of struggle, when we talk about the people we’re talking about
the 600,000 Cubans without work, who want to earn their daily bread
honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a
livelihood; the 500,000 farm laborers who live in miserable shacks, who
work four months of the year and starve the rest . . . the 400,000 industrial
workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose
benefits are being taken away, whose homes are wretched hovels, whose
salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender . . . the
100,000 small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs . . .
the 30,000 teachers and professors who are so devoted, and so necessary
to improve the destiny of future generations and who are so badly treated
and paid. . . . To these people whose desperate roads through life have been
paved with the bricks of betrayal and false promises, we were not going to
say: “We will give you . . . ” but rather: “Here it is, now fight for it with
everything you have, so that liberty and happiness may be yours!”
—Fidel Castro, October 1, 19531
THE FAILED MONCADA ATTACK
Not long after Batista’s 1952 takeover, Fidel Castro began organizing an
armed insurgency against the government. An impassioned orator in the
mold of Chibás, Fidel had been a radical student leader at the University
of Havana. He, too, had begun to speak on a weekly radio program aimed
at the Ortodoxo Party’s youth wing. During the last half of 1952 and into
1953, he and his younger brother, Raúl Castro Ruz, trained groups of insur-
gents and planned an assault that they hoped would spark an island-wide
68
The Revolutionary Struggle, 1953–1958 69
rebellion against the Batista dictatorship. Their target was the Moncada
Barracks/Armory in Santiago, the second largest barracks in Cuba’s second
largest city. It seemed more vulnerable than the country’s primary military
base, Camp Columbia in Havana, and Santiago’s location had symbolic
importance. Prior insurrections against tyrannical rulers had always started
in Oriente, the easternmost province.
July 26, 1953. This was the day when Santiago de Cuba celebrated its
carnival, coinciding with the end of the sugar harvest. With a logic similar to
George Washington’s Christmas Eve attack on Hessian mercenaries during
the American Independence War, the Cuban rebels expected to find Batista’s
14,000 troops drunk at Santiago’s Moncada Barracks. Dressed as sergeants in
replicas of regular army uniforms, about 160 of them set out for the twelve-
mile trek from their hideout in Siboney. A backup group headed for the Ba
yamo Barracks, ninety miles farther to the west. They arrived at Moncada just
before the sounding of reveille at daybreak. Fidel’s group led the charge at
the barracks while Raúl’s smaller unit attacked the adjacent Palace of Justice.
Even years later, Castro insisted that the foolhardy operation was well
planned, but the fighters lacked sufficient experience. “If we’d taken
Moncada we’d have toppled Batista, without question,” he said. “In Santiago
de Cuba, it would have taken them hours to recover from the chaos and con-
fusion that would have been created in their ranks, and that would have given
us time for the subsequent steps.”2
In fact, the rebels were quickly overwhelmed by superior numbers and
firepower—and by disorganization. Some of the fighters became lost in
Santiago and could not find the Moncada. With eight of his comrades killed
and twelve wounded, Fidel ordered a withdrawal. He and Raúl fled with
fewer than half the insurgents to the countryside. A few days later, they were
captured. Batista ordered that ten prisoners be shot for every soldier killed in
the attack (thirteen had died), and the slaughter was halted at seventy only by
the intercession of Cardinal Manuel Arteaga y Betancourt, the archbishop of
Havana.3 Two months later, Batista put the remaining July 26th Movement
survivors on trial.
“HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME”
Fidel served as the defense lawyer in the first of two trials of about 100 defen-
dants, some of whom had not even been connected to the attack. His skilled
oratory won leniency for a majority of those charged. A month later, he repre-
sented himself as a defendant in the second trial. Speaking extemporaneously
(he later reconstructed and published, perhaps with some embellishment, his
70 Chapter 7
two-hour defense), the rebel leader declared with a nationalist fervor, “We are
Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty. . . . We were taught . . . to sing every
afternoon the verses of our national anthem: ‘To live in chains is to live in dis-
grace and in opprobrium,’ and ‘to die for one’s homeland is to live forever!’”
And in conclusion, he told the court, “I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the
fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my compañeros
[comrades]. Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”4
The court sentenced Fidel to fifteen years in prison and Raúl to thirteen years.
Dispatched to a penitentiary on the Isle of Pines, they were treated as political
prisoners, not common criminals, which meant they were able to receive books
and even cigars. As biographer Robert Quirk recounts, Fidel saw confinement
as an opportunity “to mold his group into an educated and disciplined phalanx
of insurrectionists.”5 They requested reading material from friends and rela-
tives, and by the end of the year, their library had over three hundred volumes.
Fidel read widely, favoring histories of military battles, masterwork novels of
authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, and Cirilo Villaverde, and
the classic works of Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx—though
he did not dwell on Marxist-Leninist theory.6 (In a 2001 interview with one of
the authors, Castro remarked that his “understanding of socialism did not come
from books, like it did for academics, but from personal experiences.”)
But school lasted only twenty months. Six months after Batista’s 1954
landslide “election” victory, he sought to add further legitimacy to his rule
by reinstating some civil liberties, such as a guarantee of free expression,
and granting amnesty to all political prisoners, including those involved in
the Moncada attack. Yet the veneer of democracy did not produce the in-
tended political effect. Student protests intensified in late 1955, and Batista
responded with waves of repression against even moderate opponents.7
By then both Fidel and Raúl had left Cuba for Mexico, having decided
that the only viable way to effect political change in Cuba would be through
armed revolt. Fifty years later, Fidel recalled to Ignacio Ramonet, “I wasn’t in
any imminent danger, but I couldn’t keep agitating in Cuba. . . . In the weeks
after we got out of prison, we had engaged in an intense campaign to take our
ideas to the people. . . . We had structured our own revolutionary organiza-
tion—the 26th of July Movement—and we’d shown that it was impossible to
carry out the struggle by peaceful, legal means.”8
By July 1955, when Fidel arrived in Mexico, Raúl already had assembled
a contingency of other Cuban exiles. As the group planned for their armed
return to Cuba, Raúl introduced Fidel to a twenty-seven-year-old Argentine
doctor—Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna—who had fled to Mexico the
previous year from Guatemala, where he witnessed the US-sponsored coup
against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. Castro re-
membered that “There was nothing surprising about our immediate sympathy
with one another: . . . he’d visited Guatemala, he’d witnessed the American
intervention there, and he knew we’d attacked a military stronghold, he knew
about our struggle in Cuba, he knew how we thought. I arrived, we talked to
each other, and right there he joined us.”9
THE REVOLUTIONARY CONFLICT
Over the next eighteen months, the Castro brothers and Che organized a new
plan of attack with the exiles. They trained first at a farm close to Mexico
City and then moved farther away after the Mexican government raided the
place. In late November 1956, eighty-two of them squeezed aboard a small
cabin cruiser, the Granma, and set off on a 1,200-mile, treacherous voyage to
Oriente Province, the birthplace of Cuban uprisings. Facing rough seas, they
made slower progress than anticipated and ran aground on December 2, 1956,
two days after their planned arrival, which was intended to coincide with a
multipronged set of disruptions in Santiago led by Frank País.
País was a prominent figure among a number of young militants who had
been creating an underground network throughout the country—mainly in
urban areas—aimed at overthrowing the Batista dictatorship. These included
Armando Hart, Faustino Pérez, and Haydee Santamaría in Havana, and Celia
Sánchez and Vilma Espín in Santiago.
Within days of the landing, the Cuban military discovered and attacked the
Granma rebels. Only eighteen—including Fidel, Raúl, and Che—evaded de-
tection by lying under leaves and straw in a sugar cane field. Bone weary and
exhausted, they seemed to face certain annihilation as a search plane circled
overhead, looking for any signs of movement. “There was never any situation
more dramatic,” Fidel exclaimed in his autobiography. “When I realized there
was no way I could stay awake, that I was sure to fall asleep, I lay down on
my side and put the rifle butt between my legs and the end of the barrel under
my chin. I didn’t want to be captured alive if the enemy should come upon
me while I was asleep.”10
But protected and sustained by sympathetic campesinos, the survivors
managed to retreat and regroup in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Castro said
that at one point, they had only seven rifles among them as they sought to
rebuild an insurgency once more. Slowly, they made contact with their urban
allies, students, and other government opponents. “We are in no hurry,” Fidel
wrote to País in 1957. “We’ll keep fighting as long as is necessary.”11
As they developed support lines, Fidel chose targets of opportunity whose
impact would be more psychological than tactical. The July 26th fighters
began attacking lightly defended outposts of the government’s rural guard
that the local citizenry despised. In January 1957, the rebels ambushed a rural
72 Chapter 7
guard column at La Plata, seizing weapons, and in May, successfully attacked

another column at El Uvero.12
The most powerful impact came from an interview with Fidel Castro,
which appeared in the New York Times on February 24, 1957. Until that point,
there was still uncertainty about whether the military had killed the young
firebrand. Journalist Herbert Matthews answered the question dramatically in
his lead sentence, “Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth, is alive and
fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastnesses
of the Sierra Maestra, at the southern tip of the island.”13
Havana members of the July 26th Movement had arranged for the Times’
correspondent to make a dangerous and arduous trek to the guerrillas’ moun-
tain hideaway. Cleverly, Fidel ordered the small group of fighters there to
march continuously around the encampment, changing their clothes, to make
it appear that their numbers were far greater than the reality.14 Matthews re-
ported, “President Fulgencio Batista has the cream of his Army around the
area, but the Army men are fighting a thus-far losing battle to destroy the
most dangerous enemy General Batista has yet faced in a long and adventur-
ous career as a Cuban leader and dictator.”
The journalist then described Fidel Castro in terms that made him inescap-
ably appealing to a US audience:
The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men
adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of
Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ide-
als, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership. . . . He has strong ideas
of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold
elections. . . . The 26th of July Movement talks of nationalism, anti-colonialism,
anti-imperialism. I asked Señor Castro about that. He answered, “You can be
sure we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people.”15
Historian Hugh Thomas has argued that “the significance of the interview
was considerable” for the revolutionary struggle. “Matthews created for
North Americans the legend of Castro, the hero of the mountains.” The story
also demoralized the military, he explained, and as word spread throughout
Cuba that Castro was alive, it propelled more people to join the movement.16
BATISTA IMPOSES A REIGN OF TERROR
Tactics Resemble Weyler’s Butchery

In response, Batista ordered his forces to pursue the July 26th Movement
vigorously. The army carried out sweeps of the countryside, terrorizing
people who might provide logistical support to the rebels. It designated key
military zones where peasants and farmers were forced from their homes
and taken to relocation camps. The government warned that it would pre-
sume stragglers in the militarized zones were guerrilla supporters and thus
would be subject to arrest—or worse.17
His tactics were remarkably similar to those of General Weyler, the Span-
ish military tyrant who instituted a “reconcentration campaign” while killing
many Cubans during the 1895–1898 Independence War. And they had a simi-
lar effect. Castro’s fledgling rebel force, which had shrunk to only a dozen
men at one point, swelled with new supporters, as had the insurgency against
the Spaniards.
Despite Batista’s repressive measures, the army failed to quell the rebel-
lion. By early 1958, Raúl Castro had opened a second front in northern
Oriente, and Juan Almeida commanded a third front north of Santiago. The
insurgency also initiated Radio Rebelde from a portable clandestine transmit-
ter in the Sierra Maestra. In bypassing the censured media, the island-wide
broadcasts provided encouraging information to supporters, and they were
able to organize calls for strikes and demonstrations.
Anti-Batista Forces Composed of Many Factions

But the guerrillas were not the sole threat to Batista’s rule, and perhaps were
not even the most important. The rebellion was widespread and took many
forms, including individual acts of sabotage, spontaneous violent responses
to abuses, small strikes against particular employers, and mass mobilizations.
Many were not directed by or coordinated with the July 26th Movement be-
cause the urban underground (known as the llano in contrast to the fighters
in the mountains, who were known as the sierra) was made up of diverse
factions. It included trade unionists, middle-class professionals, students,
and even traditional politicians. Raúl Chibás, the brother of Ortodoxo Party
founder Eduardo Chibás, led a civic resistance movement. Federation of
University Students head José Antonio Echeverria formed a unit to engage
in direct action, the Revolutionary Directorate. Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
directed July 26th Movement’s National Student Front from Havana.
In July 1957, Frank País organized a meeting between the Sierra Maestra
rebels and key Ortodoxo Party members and other civil leaders. The summit
culminated in the “Pact of the Sierra,” which called for measures aimed at
deposing Batista in order to hold a democratic presidential election. The con-
vocation’s success set the stage for the unified opposition to Batista that even-
tually would recognize Fidel Castro as leader of all revolutionary groups.18
74 Chapter 7
More than anyone else, País helped to shape Castro’s crucial international
image in those early months. He met regularly with US officials, including
CIA operatives, assuring them that Castro’s goals included a pledge of gov-
ernment stability—the perennial concern of US governments dealing with
the island, for fear that Cuba under Cuban popular control would become a
state similar to Haiti. País assured the Americans that would not be the case.
“Indeed the rebels had something of a cheering section back at the analytical
section of the CIA, where ‘my staff and I were all fidelistas,’ the lead desk
officer for Cuba later noted,” as historian Julia Sweig reports.19
País was both an “inspirational organizer and political fixer,” journalist
Richard Gott explains, and had become “the acknowledged leader of the
[July 26th] Movement outside the Sierra.”20 He was tireless in uniting the
non-sierra factions, and in securing weapons, ammunition, food, and supplies
for the fighters. But País’s critical contributions to the struggle ended shortly
after the July 1957 Sierra Maestra meeting, when the Santiago police gunned
him down in an ambush at the end of the month. His assassination provoked
a massive funeral and general strikes that spread across the island.
Only after a major misstep nine months later was the insurgency able to pull
itself together in a way that could provide a sufficiently broad base to topple
the dictatorship. But that achievement, Sweig learned from Cuban archival
documents, would not have been possible without “the work of the 26th of
July Movement outside of the Sierra Maestra during the first seventeen months
of the insurgency, from November 1956 until April 1958.” Castro, in effect,
confirmed her conclusion in a long account he published in 2010 about the last
stages of the revolutionary war. The July 26th Movement, he stated, “never
considered developing a military force capable of defeating the Cuban Armed
Forces.” The strategy was “to create a true revolution,” in which the guerrillas
were merely “a well-armed vanguard.”21 In fact, Sweig reports, “until the last
six to eight months of the two-year insurrection, the lion’s share of decisions
. . . [was] made by lesser known individuals from the urban underground.”22
The turning point came on April 9, 1958, with a failed general strike.
Fidel Castro had opposed calling the strike, arguing that the necessary
preparations for success were not in place—a critical mass of workers and
the trade unions were not ready to support it, the July 26th Movement had not
coordinated with other organizations, and there were not enough weapons for
the urban militia to challenge the inevitable violence against workers by the
army and police.23 But the llano strongly favored it. In part, the disagreement
reflected tension within the broader insurrection over who would lead it. Had
a successful strike caused Batista’s government to fall, as a strike in 1933 had
overthrown Machado’s dictatorship, leadership of a new government would
naturally have fallen to the urban rebels.
REBELS UNITE
Impact of Failed General Strike

The strike was an absolute dud. Faustino Pérez summarized the debacle by
highlighting a fatal error: the leaders kept the date of the strike secret and
then announced it on the radio “at an hour when only housewives listen to the
radio.”24 In Havana, few workers participated; no stores, factories, or offices
had to close; sabotage caused blackouts that lasted only for a few hours. In
Santiago, many workers went on strike, but were quickly replaced by scabs.
The air force attacked guerrillas in control of Sagua la Grande in Las Villas
Province, driving them away by April 10. The military and police killed more
than two hundred rebels, inflicting a major blow to the insurrection.
Despite his opposition, Castro ultimately supported the strike. But in a
letter to Celia Sánchez one week later, he described his disappointment and
frustration. The strike, he wrote, “involved a great moral rout for the Move-
ment. . . . I am the supposed leader of this Movement, and in the eyes of his-
tory I must take responsibility for the stupidity of others, but I am a shit who
can decide nothing at all.”25
The tactical failure of the general strike gave Batista hope that the rebellion
could still be halted. He redoubled his military effort and sent 10,000 soldiers
to the Sierra Maestra in a final attempt to root out Castro’s rebels.26 The two-
month campaign failed, and the guerrillas’ success added stature to the sierra
fighters and Castro, who seized the opportunity to plan the final phase of the
war. In early May, he had emerged from an intense two-day gathering of July
26th Movement factional leaders as the general secretary of the now unified
organization and commander-in-chief of the rebel army.27
Pact of Caracas
Two months later, representatives of all of the anti-Batista groups—except
the communists—met in Caracas, Venezuela, to hammer out a common
program. The breadth of participation in the meeting was unique in Cuban
history: trade unionists, students, guerrilla fighters, lawyers from the Civic
Resistance and Civic Dialogue, the head of the Catholic Democratic Mon-
tecristi Movement, and even Carlos Prío, the discredited president whom
Batista had ousted. On July 20, the group endorsed a unity text called the
Pact of Caracas, and it named Fidel to be the commander-in-chief of the new
united rebel army.28
Meanwhile, the Cuban economy was disintegrating. In 1958, more than
half a million people—out of 2.7 million in the labor force—were unem-
ployed or underemployed. The proliferation of street crime and the growing
76 Chapter 7
presence of beggars garnered support for the insurrection from the middle
class. As some major roads had become impassable and railroad tracks were
destroyed by insurgents or damaged in battles, there were shortages through-
out the island and some sugar mills had to shut down. Business leaders began
to turn on Batista, whom they viewed as the main source of instability and
impediment to improved economic conditions.29
COMMUNIST, SOVIET, AND

US ROLES IN THE REVOLUTION
The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) was founded in August 1925, largely by
eastern European émigrés. Political scientist Mervyn Bain notes that its initial
proclamations “were written in Yiddish before being translated into Span-
ish.”30 It conveyed a sense of being internationalist more than nationalist,
and it closely followed whatever party line emanated from Moscow. By the
1940s, however, it also was closely identified with the most militant Cuban
trade unions. In keeping with the “popular front” policy of the Third [Com-
munist] International, or Comintern, two PCC members even joined Batista’s
cabinet when he served as the constitutionally elected president during World
War II. Recall that the PCC had changed its name during World War II to the
Popular Socialist Party (PSP). PSP candidates were able to garner 10 percent
of the votes cast in the 1946 congressional elections.31
The PSP’s electoral success increased Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s interest
in Cuba, especially as the Cold War was beginning. But the Soviets were far
too weak to confront the United States directly, and sought to avoid provok-
ing US intervention. In general, they hoped to gain influence through political
means, not armed conflict, which coincided with the aims of the PSP leader-
ship. “Cuban communists,” political scientist Marifeli Pérez-Stable explained,
“espoused militant reform, not revolution. . . . [They] operated in the political
mainstream while challenging the predominant logic of corruption.”32
As a result, the PSP distanced itself from the July 26th Movement’s ac-
tivities until 1958. The party disparagingly characterized the 1953 Moncada
attack as “putschism.”33 PSP sympathizers in the Cuban Labor Confederation
discouraged workers from participating in strikes organized by the July 26th
Movement, including the April 9, 1958, general strike. It is little wonder that
Castro displayed contempt for much of the PSP leadership, and that the July
26th Movement received no assistance from the Soviet Union.
Yet both the Movement and the PSP saw a need to find common ground. If
the revolution was going to be inclusive and broad-based—as Fidel, Raúl, and
Che intended—it had to involve the communists, who still held considerable
influence among trade unionists. From the perspective of the PSP, it feared
being left behind as the July 26th Movement gained momentum, and it had
nowhere else to turn as Batista increased attacks on the party. In July 1958,
after numerous individual meetings between high ranking members of the PSP
and the July 26th Movement, a kind of official reconciliation occurred and the
PSP joined the unified opposition.34
One indication of how little Cuban affairs concerned the Eisenhower ad-
ministration was its appointment of Earl E. T. Smith as US ambassador in
1957. A Wall Street financier and mayor of Palm Beach, Florida, Smith’s ma-
jor credentials for the post were his chairmanship of the Florida Republican
Party’s finance committee and his membership on the Republican National
Finance Committee.35 However, by early 1958 top US officials grew worried
that Batista’s “repressive measures” had “alienated some 80 percent of the
Cuban people,” which made instability on the island a threat to US inter-
ests.36 And so in March 1958, in an effort to encourage the Cuban dictator to
give up power, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suspended new US military
assistance to Cuba, which had been receiving the second largest sum in the
hemisphere. But he allowed weapons still in the pipeline to flow to Cuba and
the US military missions to stay on the island, and he refrained from making
a strong public statement against Batista.
While the United States formally maintained a policy of “strict neutrality”
in the expanding civil war, some US government agencies sought a “third
force” to replace Batista with someone less radical than Fidel Castro.37 Sec-
retary of State Christian A. Herter made this objective explicit in a memo-
randum to President Eisenhower on December 23, 1958: “The Department
has concluded that any solution in Cuba requires that Batista must relinquish
power whether as Chief of State or as the force behind a puppet successor.
. . . The Department clearly does not want to see Castro succeed to the leader-
ship of the Government.”38 In accord with this policy, earlier in December the
State Department had sent a secret emissary to negotiate with Batista, offer-
ing him asylum and monetary incentives to leave. Batista refused.
* * *
As the momentum turned toward the rebels in September, Castro came down
from the Sierra Maestra and set off on the road to Santiago de Cuba, the
country’s second largest city. His top commanders fanned out and fought the
disintegrating Batista army on all fronts. Finally, before dawn on New Year’s
Day 1959, the dictator packed up his family and friends, headed to the airstrip
at Camp Columbia, and departed into ignominious exile in the Dominican
Republic. Twenty-five months after Fidel’s exhausted rebel force, armed with
only seven guns, began its campaign, the 26th of July Movement had swelled
to 50,000 hardened fighters.
78 Chapter 7
NOTES
1. Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me,” in Fidel Castro Reader, ed. David
Deutschmann and Deborah Schnookal (New York: Ocean Press, 2007), 65–66.
2. Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro: My Life, A Spoken Autobiog-
raphy (New York: Scribner, 2006), 114–15.
3. Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: Norton, 1993), 54–55.
4. Castro, “History Will Absolve Me,” 103–5.
5. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 61.
6. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 62–63.
8. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 172.
13. Herbert L. Matthews, “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout,” New York Times,
February 24, 1957, 1.
14. Herbert L. Matthews, Fidel Castro (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969),
108–9.
15. Matthews, “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout.”
16. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row,
1971), 919, 920.
17. Pérez, Cuba, 229–30.
18. Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Un-
derground (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 32–36.
19. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 29.
21. Fidel Castro Ruz, La Victoria Estratégica (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones
del Consejo de Estado, 2010), 7. [Translation by the authors.]
22. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 9.
23. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 131–32.
24. Quoted in Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: William Morrow,
1986), 441.
25. Quoted in Szulc, Fidel, 441–42.
26. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 196
27. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 150–51.
28. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, chapter 15.
29. Pérez, Cuba, 237–32; Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The
United States and Cuba, 1952–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 58.
30. Mervyn J. Bain, From Lenin to Castro, 1917–1959 (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2013), 33.
31. Bain, From Lenin to Castro, 55.
32. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy,
second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 49.
33. Bain, From Lenin to Castro, 61.
35. Marvine Howe, “Earl Smith, 87, Ambassador to Cuba in the 1950s,” New York
Times, February 17, 1991.
36. Christian A. Herter, “Memorandum from the Acting Secretary of State to the
President,” December 23, 1958, in US Department of State, Office of the Historian,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, Document
189, 305.
37. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, 62–65.
38. Herter, “Memorandum from the Acting Secretary of State to the President,”
December 23, 1958, 305.
Part II
1959–1989
Chapter 8
The Quest for Sovereignty
I believe that this is a decisive moment in our history: tyranny has been
overthrown. The joy is immense, but there is much left to be done. Let
us not fool ourselves into believing that all that lies ahead will be easy;
perhaps all that lies ahead may be more difficult. . . . The destiny of Cuba,
our own destiny and the destiny of our people are at stake.
—Fidel Castro, January 8, 19591
A NATIONALIST REVOLUTION
Fidel set off for Havana on January 2, 1959, leading a truck convoy of guer-
rilla fighters westward. This “caravan of liberty” crossed the country slowly
to greet throngs of cheering Cubans and to swell popular support for the July
26th Movement. He arrived triumphantly in Havana on January 8, 1959.
Cubans embraced the 1959 revolution for many reasons, but the com-
mon thread was the broad majority’s opposition to the wanton violence and
widespread corruption of the Batista regime. The revolution succeeded, Fidel
Castro remarked in April 1959, primarily because of the “fear and hatred of
Batista’s secret police.”2 The Eisenhower administration had been well aware
of the cruelty that Batista’s forces had inflicted on Cubans. A January 1958
State Department memo recommended that the president suspend arms ship-
ments to Cuba, and urged the White House to warn Batista that “excessive
brutalities by certain Cuban officials should be curtailed, some of the more
violent and sadistic officials of the army and police be removed.”3
Cuba’s new leaders knew that revolutions can quickly turn ugly and de-
stroy the chance for change to take firm root. They wanted to avoid the kind
of Jacobin fury that emerged after the 1789 French Revolution. Yet they also
81
82 Chapter 8
sought an outlet for the seething public desire to avenge the Batista regime’s
atrocities. By holding public trials in Havana’s central sports stadium, the
new government provided a kind of cathartic focus for the pent-up emotions.
Arguably, the first six months of the revolution might have been even more
violent without such trials. Consider that even as one of the Batista’s regime’s
most notorious members—Major Jésus Sosa Blanco—was being tried, vigi-
lantes attempted to lynch two other officers awaiting judgment.4
Ultimately, the revolutionary government executed about five hundred
Batista officials, military officers, and secret police members, and impris-
oned hundreds more. Western governments quickly characterized the trials
as kangaroo courts. Indeed, they did lack traditional hallmarks of procedural
fairness. Yet the public trials and executions were endorsed even by conserva-
tive elements of the anti-Batista coalition, such as Prime Minister José Miró
Cardona, who willingly signed numerous execution orders, and President
Manuel Urrutia Lleó. While the trials thus cost the new government some
international confidence, they helped the July 26th Movement to consolidate
power and enhance its legitimacy. The “trials” provided the populace with
an outlet for its intense anger about the horrors Batista and his henchmen
had inflicted on so many innocent Cubans. In retrospect, the toll of officials
and officers executed was modest in comparison to what mob justice might
have produced. Moreover, thousands of lower-level military members were
dismissed without any penalty.
Leaders of the Movement already had acquired popular support by repeat-
edly claiming that the revolution was rooted in the ninety years of struggle
for independence, which had begun in 1868 with the Ten-Year War. In its
Program Manifesto, the July 26th Movement did not focus on the country’s
growing wealth gap and entrenched poverty of the population’s bottom third.
It defined the revolution’s aims as “national affirmation, human dignity, and
democratic order.”5 The leaders charged that earlier revolutionary episodes
either had been crushed or stolen by the Spanish or the United States, or had
been tainted when inauthentic leaders sold out Cubans’ quest for national
sovereignty, as in 1933 after the 100-day government of Ramón Grau San
Martín failed. Members of the Communist Party, which was called the Popu-
lar Socialist Party (PSP), similarly lacked legitimacy. Several PSP leaders had
served in Batista’s first administration in the 1940s, and the party as a whole
had opposed armed struggle against Batista in 1956 and 1957.
The young rebels of the July 26th Movement carried no such baggage.
Three of the four revolutionary leaders—Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Ca-
milo Cienfuegos—had no ties to communist organizations.6 (Raúl Castro, the
fourth, had once attended a World Youth Congress sponsored by the Soviet
Communist Party.) Moreover, they had earned the legitimacy to rule from
The Quest for Sovereignty 83
the testament of battle, a willingness to give up their lives for the struggle.
Sacrifice—readiness to die for the cause—became the test of authenticity.
The revolutionary leaders held up as exemplars historic figures such as José
Martí: “Good Cubans were expected to die for their patria.”7 By 1960, the
new leaders had transformed the rebel battle cry—libertad o muerte, liberty
or death—into a national slogan: patria o muerte, homeland or death.8 In this
way authenticity, death, country, and sovereignty became one.
FISSURES ARISE
Competing Interests Emerge

In his in 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington decried the
danger of faction and emphasized the importance of unity for his new, revo-
lutionary country, the United States. He declared, “The Unity of Government
which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it
is a main Pillar in the Edifice of your real independence, the support of your
tranquility at home; your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of
that very Liberty which you so highly prize.”9 Similarly, José Martí repeat-
edly called for “social unity,” Lillian Guerra explains, which “made him a
fiercely seductive symbol whose appropriation became increasingly neces-
sary for competing political sectors in the Republic as they became more
divided.” Martí, she notes, “emphasized the power of the collective political
will and individual self-sacrifice as the means for resolving differences.”10
Fidel hearkened to Martí as he anticipated that the new revolutionary gov-
ernment would soon confront the challenge of trying to satisfy competing
demands from all those who had united in the single goal of overthrowing
the Batista dictatorship. Without a common enemy, he feared, fissures in that
unity would emerge quickly. On January 8, he asserted,
The first thing we who created this revolution must ask ourselves is what were
our intentions . . . if we created this Revolution thinking that we would overthrow
tyranny and then take advantage of perks of power . . . if we thought it was a
matter of getting rid of a couple of ministers to replace them with others. . . . Or
if each of us acted selflessly, and each of us acted with a true spirit of sacrifice.11
Indeed, some moderates had joined the campaign because they were ap-
palled by Batista’s violent repression and disregard for human rights; others
had focused on his regime’s corruption and willingness to give the mafia
effective carte blanche over part of Cuba’s tourist industry. Some genuinely
believed that the enormous gap between the country’s rich and poor could be
84 Chapter 8
closed significantly through liberal democratic procedures. These moderates

charged that Fidel and the July 26th Movement were “betraying” the goals
that led them to join the revolution.
Class Warfare
However, some so-called moderates invoked “democracy” merely to protect
their property and privilege. Saul Landau astutely observed that they “had
little interest in ending the state of dependency with the United States, and
absolutely no inclination to channel their wealth to the services of the ma-
jority. This was the essence of the class war that confronted Castro and the
revolutionaries by the Spring of 1959.”12
Those who had fought in the mountains and countryside (the sierra fighters)
came to believe that the corruption of the old system was so deep that it could
not be reformed and should not be restored. Their inclination to take a more
radical approach emanated in part from their experiences with the impoverished
peasantry. It was reinforced by falling sugar prices, which increased unemploy-
ment and exacerbated long-standing problems of inequality between blacks and
whites, urban and rural sectors, and western and eastern Cuba. They quickly
concluded that foreign domination of Cuba’s economy, which prevented the
country from shaping its own fate, was the cause of the dire circumstances.
US companies were not the only foreign firms involved, but they owned
the largest share of Cuba’s basic resources. Ninety percent of Cuba’s tele-
phone and electrical services, 50 percent of public service railways, 40 per-
cent of raw sugar production, and 23 percent of non-sugar industries were
US-owned. Three-fourths of the value of Cuba’s imports originated in the
United States; 59 percent of Cuban exports—including 80 percent of its ex-
ported sugar—went to the United States.13
Earl E. T. Smith, the US ambassador in 1959, acknowledged in congressio-
nal testimony that the United States had been “so overwhelmingly influential
in Cuba that . . . the American Ambassador was the second most important
man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than the President.”14 Soci-
ologist Rafael Hernández sums up what US domination over Cuba meant in
1958: “the United States determined a certain type of Cuban state, an eco-
nomic and social order, a structure of power, and even a political culture.”15
AMBIVALENCE ABOUT THE UNITED STATES
In this light, the quest for sovereignty, for an authentic Cuban independence,
naturally directed Cuban leaders to transform their country’s relationship with
Fidel Castro
After meeting Fidel Castro in April 1959, US vice president Richard Nixon
wrote that the Cuban leader “has those indefinable qualities which make him
a leader of men.”* Robert S. McNamara, former US secretary of defense and
World Bank president, told Philip Brenner in 2001 that among the group of
more than two hundred world leaders he had met, he would rank Castro as
the third most impressive (presumably after John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson, presidents under whom McNamara had served). Scores of heads of
state attended Castro’s funeral in 2016 and lauded his singular contributions to
Cuba and the third world. A brief biography cannot capture the essence of what
made him a towering historic figure; it provides merely the outline of his life.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born in Biran, Holguín, on August 13, 1926.
His father, Ángel Castro, had gone to Cuba from Galicia, Spain, in 1895 as a
soldier in the Spanish army and went back to Spain in 1898. Impoverished,
he returned to Cuba, borrowed funds to buy land, and operated a 25,000-
acre plantation, of which he owned only 2,600 acres. His mother, Lina Ruz
González, was a servant at the plantation. She was born in western Cuba to
Spanish émigrés.
Havana’s aristocracy tended to treat Fidel as an unpolished outsider in 1942
when he arrived at the Jesuit-run, prestigious El Colegio de Belén. But his tal-
ents and self-confidence enabled him to gain begrudging acceptance among
the elites. For some of them, especially those who had known Fidel personally,
the ensuing revolution then became a personal as well as a class “betrayal.”
Fidel’s first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, came from a wealthy and politically
influential family. Her brother, Rafael, a classmate of Fidel’s at the University
of Havana, introduced her to the future Cuban leader. Rafael’s father, also
named Rafael, became minister of communications and transportation dur-
ing the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. Batista also named Rafael (the son)
as deputy minister of the interior, the dreaded secret police. (Rafael emi-
grated to the United States in 1959. Two of his four sons were elected to the
US House of Representatives where they became virulent opponents of a
US-Cuban rapprochement.)
Fidel first began to focus on politics at the University of Havana, where
he studied law. Incensed by the corruption of the Ramón Grau San Martín
government, he joined the Ortodoxo (Orthodox) Party shortly after Eduardo
Chibás founded it in 1947. That same year, he also joined a group committed
to the overthrow of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, and
another group that advocated the independence of Puerto Rico. He became
head of both, as well as a leader of the Federation of University Students.
(continued)
* Richard M. Nixon, “Rough Draft of Summary of Conversation between the Vice-President and
Fidel Castro,” April 25, 1959, reprinted in Jeffrey J. Safford, “The Nixon-Castro Meeting of 19 April
1959,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 431.
86 Chapter 8
Fidel Castro (continued)

In April 1948, Fidel traveled to an international student congress in Bogotá,
Colombia, which was planned as a protest to the founding meeting of the
Organization of American States there at the same time. Caught up in a spon-
taneous riot (known as the Bogotazo) that followed the assassination of popu-
lar political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Fidel claims to have barely escaped
from Colombia without arrest. He claimed the experience had “a great influ-
ence on me. It reaffirmed some ideas and concepts I already had about the
exploited masses, the oppressed, the people seeking justice.”*
Fidel was an Ortodoxo candidate for a seat in the Cuban House of
Representatives when Batista canceled the 1952 election after the coup. With
his younger brother, Raúl, Fidel then organized a group to overthrow the dic-
tatorship and restore the constitutional republic. The July 26, 1953, attack on
the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba led to his arrest. Released in 1955
under a general amnesty, Fidel left for Mexico to organize from exile an armed
insurrection. As commander in chief of the rebel army, he directed the military
actions of the 26th of July Movement, and following the 1958 Pact of Caracas,
Fidel became head of the unified anti-Batista struggle.
In 1959, Fidel was initially the commander in chief of the new Cuban
armed forces and quickly took on the responsibility of prime minister. He
served as first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from its founding in
1965 until 2011. Under the 1976 constitution, he became president of the
Council of State and president of the Council of Ministers, positions he tem-
porarily relinquished in 2006 due to illness and formally in 2008. He died on
November 25, 2016, in Havana.
* Fidel Castro, My Early Years, ed. and trans. Deborah Shnookal and Pedro Álvarez Tabío (Mel-
bourne: Ocean Press, 1998), 124.
the United States. That goal did not emerge from an anti-American ideology
or from the leaders’ visceral hatred of the United States, antipathy to US de-
mocracy, or envy of US wealth, as some critics have alleged.16 The conclusion
that Cuba could not be both sovereign and dependent on the United States
was based on the accumulation of experiences during the previous sixty-year
period, as a result of specific US actions in Cuba, and drew from theoretical
currents popular in Latin America known as “dependency theory.”17 Cuban
anti-Americanism was akin to what historian Max Paul Friedman described
in his seminal study of the phenomenon throughout the world. Especially in
Latin America, he observed, anti-Americanism was not a concept or ideology
but a response to US intervention and exploitation.18 Indeed, it was character-
ized more by distrust than dislike. Louis Pérez aptly observed that there was
a “pervasive ambiguity” for Cubans about North Americans, which alternated
“between trust and suspicion, between esteem and scorn, between a desire to
emulate and a need to repudiate.”19
Fidel Castro declared in his first public speech on January 1, 1959, “The his-
tory of ’95 will not repeat itself. This time the mambises [revolutionary fighters]
will enter Santiago de Cuba!”20 He was referring to the end of the 1895–1898
Independence War, when US forces prevented General Calixto Garcia from en-
tering Santiago with his troops. The meaning was evident: this time the United
States would not be able to seize control from the revolutionaries.
Cuba’s relationship with the United States lay at the heart of the divisions
among the anti-Batista factions. For the wealthiest 20 percent of the Cuban
population, a break with the United States would produce a fundamental
identity crisis because it had acculturated itself intimately to North America’s
social norms and values. Pérez describes how the process of acculturation had
shaped the elites’ worldview:
The well-being of many people, specifically as it related to economic devel-

opment and prosperity, which also implies social peace and political order,
was increasingly linked to the United States: entry to its markets, access to its
products, use of its capital, application of its technology. . . . These were com-
plex social processes, for they involved the incorporation of a new hierarchy of
values into Cuban life. Tens of thousands of Cubans of all classes—children and
adults, men and women, black and white—were integrated directly into North
American structures at virtually every turn; as customers, clients, coworkers, as
employees and business partners, in professional organizations and voluntary
associations, at school and in social clubs, in church and on teams.21
The Cuban elite had sent its children to US universities so that they sub-
sequently could take up management positions with US companies on the
island. They had used US products to convey a sense of higher status, and
deemed anything American better than anything Cuban—from the arts to the
design of buildings, to business strategies. In the late 1950s, Cubans would
proudly point to the new Havana Hilton—now the Habana Libre—as an ex-
ample of great Cuban architecture (see figure 8.1). In fact, it was a based on
a standard template that Hilton used throughout the world.
As wealthy Cubans did in the early twentieth century when radicals seemed
poised to change the social order, some once again called on the United States
to intervene in Cuban affairs. Washington was receptive. US officials hoped
to maintain the “special relationship” that emanated from both the invest-
ments US corporations had made in Cuba and the close ties between Cuban
property owners and US capital. These were the very bonds the nationalist
revolutionaries aimed to cut so that decisions about Cuba’s economy could be
88 Chapter 8
Figure 8.1. Poster of the new Habana Hilton from 1957.
made in Havana, not New York or Washington. The United States had almost
never allowed a country in its sphere of influence to act so independently.
The revolutionary leadership viewed the 1954 US-engineered coup in Gua-
temala, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo
Arbenz, as a demonstration of what to expect from the United States. Castro
unsuccessfully attempted to blunt the negative US reaction that he expected,
making a goodwill trip to the United States in April 1959. Cuba also offered
to repay owners of confiscated lands a price that was greater than their as-
sessed values in tax records, and promised to deliver eight million tons of
sugar to the United States at a below-market price. But the actions and rheto-
ric of the revolutionary leaders convinced the US government and most of
Cuba’s elites that they could not trust the new government.
FAVORING THE “CLASES POPULARES”
Adapting to a New Culture

As New Year’s celebrations heralded the coming of 1960, profound changes
were evident at all social and economic levels. Many middle-class Cubans
already had lost their jobs working for the departing US companies or Cuban
bourgeoisie, and those in the former lower ranks saw improvements in their
lives. Small farmers gained land, peasants gained education, blacks gained the
formal end of racial segregation, urban workers saw reduced rent for housing.
“Never before in Cuban history had a government so unabashedly favored the
clases populares,”22 political scientist Marifeli Pérez-Stable observes.
Change involved more than a matter of economic losses or gains. The
former elite experienced a profound alienation from the new order. Ed-
mundo Desnoes captured the sensation in his 1967 novel, Inconsolable
Memories. The narrator is a former businessman who survives by liv-
ing off the wealth he had accumulated. Even though he was unwilling to
abandon his homeland—as his wife, family, and friends did—the narrator
was unable to accept the revolution’s new priorities, which placed a higher
value on education and hard work than on consumption and the display of
material possessions. “Reality seems to be slipping through my fingers,”
he observes. “The revolution has introduced a new vocabulary. Words I
don’t use but hear, as if they were Mexican or Venezuelan expressions, or
Argentinisms, my own language but in a foreign country. If I keep on being
so isolated from everything that’s going on around me, the day will come
when I won’t understand a thing.”23
Ending Racial Disparities

Even for those whose lives improved, the disruptions were bewildering as
norms and roles changed. The government promoted a new public conscious-
ness that challenged routine daily practices and even the way people talked
to each other. In a March 1959 speech, newly appointed prime minister Fidel
Castro called for an end to all legal forms of discrimination—in schooling,
employment, and public facilities—and said that racism was tantamount to
acting as a traitor against the Cuban state. “It should not be necessary to pass
a law to establish a right that is earned for the simple reason of being a human
being and a member of society,” he asserted, adding,
What should be proclaimed is anathema and public condemnation against those

men, full of leftover prejudices, who have so few scruples that they discriminate
against a Cuban, mistreat a Cuban, over a matter of lighter or darker skin. . . .
We are going to put an end to racial discrimination at work centers by waging
90 Chapter 8
a campaign . . . to end this hateful, repugnant system with a new slogan: work
opportunities for every Cuban, without racial or sexual discrimination. In this
way we will forge, step by step, the new homeland.24
Blacks and mulattos made up a much higher proportion of the population

in Cuba than in the United States. The 1953 census recorded 26.9 percent
of Cuba as black or mulatto; in the 1981 census it was 33.9 percent.25 While
racial discrimination before 1959 may have been less a result of interpersonal
prejudice than in the United States, it was entrenched in the way Cuban insti-
tutions functioned. Lourdes Casal, a seminal scholar on the subject of racism
in Cuba, pointed out that several factors softened the expression of racism.
“[T]he most important leaders of the Cuban independence struggle such as
José Martí (white) and Antonio Maceo (black),” she wrote, placed great em-
phasis on “racial unity and integration.”26
Still, darker-skinned Cubans attended schools—when they were avail-
able—vastly inferior to those for whites. Afro-Cubans had the worst living
conditions and held the lowest-paid jobs. There was some social mobility for
nonwhite Cubans: Cubans elected Fulgencio Batista, a light-skinned mulatto,
as president in 1940. But the white, upper-class Havana Yacht Club denied
membership to Batista while he was in office from 1940 to 1944.
Ending Gender Disparities

Gender inequality was perhaps even more entrenched than racism. It also
was quickly challenged. Notably, the 1955 “Manifesto Number One” of the
July 26th Movement called for the end to “all vestiges of discrimination for
reasons of race or sex.”27 Data from the 1953 census reveal some indication
of women’s inequality in Cuba at the time: only 19 percent of the workforce
were women. While the overall literacy rate for men and women was com-
parable, only two-thirds of ten-year-old girls were attending school; fully
two times the number of men versus women over the age of twenty-five had
received any university education. The problem was not merely the result of
overt discrimination and the lack of opportunity. Cuba, like most of Latin
America, had a macho culture whose norms reinforced notions of “men’s”
and “women’s” work. Daily rituals structured different men’s and women’s
roles in the family and in their social relations outside of the home.
While Fidel asserted in 1966 that the “phenomenon of women in the
revolution was a revolution within a revolution,”28 the prominent women
revolutionary fighters—such as Celia Sánchez, Haydee Santamaría, and
Melba Hernández—focused their energies on ousting Batista, not on fighting
for women’s equality. Vilma Espín Guillois, Raúl Castro’s wife, became the
champion for women in the new society (figure 8.2 shows how her contribu-
tions garnered her representation on a postage stamp).
Figure 8.2. A 2008 postage stamp honoring Vilma Espín Guillois.
Espín was the first woman in Cuba to obtain a chemical engineering de-
gree. She fought alongside Raúl in 1957 and 1958, and they married in 1959,
three weeks after the triumph of the revolutionary forces. In 1960, she took
charge of the newly created Federation of Cuban Women. Her goal was to
gain legal equality for women, to make those rights meaningful by provid-
ing support that women needed in order to engage fully in society—day
care, skills training, education, and cultural awareness—and to advocate for
women’s advancement in all sectors of society.29
Cuban film director Humberto Solás conveyed the impact of the changed
status for women in his epic 1968 film, Lucía, which consists of three
stories about women named Lucía in three different revolutionary periods,
1898, 1933, and the early 1960s. In the first story, Lucía is an idle upper-
class Cuban woman who unintentionally betrays her brother, a soldier fight-
ing for independence, as the result of a naïve romance with a Spanish spy. In
the 1933 episode, Lucía is a revolutionary, but serves merely as an adjunct
to the men. The third Lucía lives in the countryside with her husband, who
expects his wife to cater to him in traditional ways. But she wants to be
educated and is painfully torn between her love for him and her anger at
his attempts to limit and deny her the opportunities for education that the
Cuban revolution was offering.
92 Chapter 8
QUEST FOR SOVEREIGNTY
Hovering over all the changes was the quest for sovereignty. The leaders
of the 1959 revolution believed that if they failed to secure this goal, their
victory would be nearly as hollow as previous revolutionaries. True indepen-
dence would mean that Cuba, not foreign companies, had control over the
country’s basic resources and infrastructure. It also meant that Cuba would
Hard Currency
The term “hard currency” refers to money generally accepted for international
trade. Economists call such funds convertible currencies. Today only the US
dollar, European euro, Japanese yen, and British pound merit the designation.
People who live in countries that create one of the four freely convertible
currencies, such as the United States, may find it difficult to appreciate the
anxiety most countries of the world suffer because they do not have ready
access to hard currency. But consider a simple example that suggests why
sellers require buyers to use hard currency for international transactions.
Suppose you had traveled to a town in the United States hundreds of miles
from home. Short on cash, and without a credit card, you find that all ATM
machines are broken when you need to pay your motel bill. Fortunately, you
brought a check from Pit Stop Bank in your city. But would the motel owner
be likely to accept your check? Would you accept such a check in payment
for selling goods or your services? The currencies of most countries are like a
check from Pit Stop Bank, which is why those countries need to use a univer-
sally acceptable currency.
There are essentially three legal ways in which Cuba obtains hard currency.
It can: (1) sell goods or services for hard currency, including sugar, tobacco,
pharmaceuticals, beach vacations, and the labor of Cubans; (2) receive “gifts,”
including foreign assistance grants from governments and remittances from
individuals; (3) take out loans from an international financial institution, a
bank, a global corporation, or a foreign government, which typically must be
repaid in hard currency. “Gifts” have become increasingly less available to
poor countries, and loans—in the worst cases—may incur interest payments
that could absorb as much as 50 percent of a country’s hard currency earnings
from the first two sources.
Most countries cannot be self-sufficient and must rely on imports in order
to survive. Cuba imports food, oil for heating, electricity, transportation,
manufactured goods, and even ordinary items of daily life such as needle and
thread. With only a limited reserve of hard currencies earned from selling
goods and services, Cuba must evaluate every import in relation to the total
amount of hard currency it has available to spend. This situation presses Cuba
to search continually for a strategy that will enable it to earn more hard cur-
rency in order to develop its economy.
need to expand its trading relations, so it would not depend on only one
country, and to diversify how it earned hard currency beyond selling sugar.
Relying mainly on sugar exports left the country vulnerable to the variability
of the international commodity market, while the cost of finished products
that the country needed to import kept rising.
Cuba’s reliance on sugar as its main source of hard currency had several
harmful consequences. Cane was grown on land that could have produced
food for domestic consumption, and as a result, Cuba had to spend scarce
hard currency on importing food. Cuba’s infrastructure was oriented to
sugar production, which made starting other industries expensive. Work
in the sugar industry was mostly seasonal, and laborers commonly had no
employment or income for eight months of the year. The resulting inequal-
ity forced Cuba to depend on foreigners for a range of services that poorly
educated Cubans could not provide.
In short, by 1960 Cuba’s revolutionary leaders assumed that in order to
develop a citizenry that had the dignity to believe in its own self-worth, they
had to establish the country’s sovereignty, which would require a transformed
relationship with the United States. In effect, Cuba’s leaders chose sover-
eignty over dependency and the quest for sovereignty became the Cuban
Revolution’s guiding objective.
NOTES
1. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” January 8, 1959, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/

discursos/1959/esp/f080159e.html.
2. Thomas Bergenschild, “Dr. Castro’s Princeton Visit, April 1959,” as quoted in
Gott, Cuba, 166.
3. William A. Wieland, “Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Middle
American Affairs (Wieland) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs (Rubottom),” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Volume VI,
Cuba (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Office of the Historian), Document
5, January 17, 1958, 10.
4. R. Hart Phillips, “Batista Major Condemned in Havana Stadium Trial,” New
York Times, January 24, 1959, 1.
5. “Program Manifesto of the 26th of July Movement,” November 1956; reprinted
in Cuba in Revolution, ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés (Garden City,
NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1972), 113.
6. Antoni Kapcia, Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the 1950s (London: Reak-
tion Books, 2008), 28.
94 Chapter 8
9. George Washington, “The Farewell Address,” Transcript of the Final Manu-

script, September 19, 1796; available at the Papers of George Washington, University
of Virginia, 5 and 6, http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/farewell/transcript.html.
10. Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early-
Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6.
11. Castro, “Discurso,” January 8, 1959.
12. Saul Landau, “Asking the Right Questions about Cuba,” in The Cuba Reader:
1988), xxiii.
13. Ibarra, Prologue to Revolution, 18–19, 35; Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting
Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 35; Robin Blackburn, “Prologue to the Cuban Revo-
lution,” New Left Review, no. 21 (October 1963): 59–60.
14. Testimony of Earl E. T. Smith in “Communist Threat to the United States
Through the Caribbean,” Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Admin-
istration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee
on the Judiciary, US Senate, 86th Cong., 2nd Sess., Part 9, August 30, 1960.
15. Rafael Hernández, “Intimate Enemies: Paradoxes in the Conflict Between the
United States and Cuba,” in Debating US-Cuban Relations: Shall We Play Ball? ed.
Jorge I. Domínguez, Rafael Hernández, and Lorena G. Barberia (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2011), 20.
16. Brian Latell, After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro’s Regime and Cuba’s Next
Leader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Jaime Suchliki, “Why Cuba Will Still
Be Anti-American After Castro,” Atlantic, March 4, 2013.
17. H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-Soviet World
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 36–42; Heraldo Muñoz, ed., From
Dependency to Development (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981); Fernando Enrique Car-
doso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979).
18. Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Excep-
tional Concept in American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), chapter 4.
19. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, xvi.
20. Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha con Fidel—1959 (Havana: Editoria Letras
Cubanas, 1998), 24. Translation by the authors. Original: “¡La historia del 95 no se
repetirá! ¡Esta vez los mambises entrarán en Santiago de Cuba!”
21. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 7, 157.
22. Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution, 67.
23. Edmundo Desnoes, Inconsolable Memories (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1990), 140.
24. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech,” March 23, 1959. University of Texas, “Castro
Speech Data Base, http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1959/19590323
.html.
25. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899–1981,” Journal of
Contemporary History 30, no. 1 (January 1995): 135.
26. Lourdes Casal, “Race Relations in Contemporary Cuba,” in The Cuba Reader:
1988), 477.
27. Quoted in Sarah Stephens, Women’s Work: Gender Equality in Cuba and the
Role of Women in Building Cuba’s Future (Washington, DC: Center for Democracy
in the Americas, 2013), 21.
28. Fidel Castro, “Speech at Close of Fifth FMC National Plenum,” December 10,
1966, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1966/19661210.html.
29. Max Azicri, “Women’s Development through Revolutionary Mobilization,” in
The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al.
(New York: Grove, 1988), 457–66; Raisa Pagés, “The Status of Women: From Eco-
nomically Dependent to Independent,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing
the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
Chapter 9
Consolidating the Revolution

Culture and Politics
The character of “Cuban” had become contested terrain, and the contest
itself served as a force of change. Never before had the narrative on na-
tionality so fully engaged the public imagination. Much of this had to do
with the affirmation Cuban, of a Cuba for Cubans. . . . The proposition of
Cuban resonated across the island. Once more consumption became a way
to affirm nationality, but now the products were Cuban-made. Advertisers
stressed the virtues of locally produced merchandise. Vitamin supplement
Transfusán B-12 was identified as “Cuban and better!” . . . The demand
for Cuban spread in all directions. Architects called for a national build-
ing style. “Operación discos Cubanos” announced a campaign to organize
a national record company. The National Ballet was established in June
1959. A national film company, the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic
Art and Industry (ICAIC), was organized in March 1959. Cuban musicians
and entertainers began to work the nightclub and cabaret venues. For the
first time since its opening in 1957, the Copa Room at the Hotel Riviera
staged an all-Cuban production.
—Louis A. Pérez, Jr.1
The Revolution exhilarated a broad majority of Cubans, giving them hope

that they could right the wrongs of neocolonial exploitation and remedy
long-term injustices. (In 1960, a respected public opinion poll found that
86 percent of respondents supported the government and half of those were
“fervent” backers.2) Yet that spirit alone would hardly suffice to achieve
revolutionary goals. The victors faced daunting tasks in four arenas if they
were to make the 1959 revolution different than the failed efforts in 1898 and
1933: (1) Culture, strengthening Cubans’ identity with the country by privi-
leging and even creating a distinctive Cuban culture; (2) Politics, changing
the relationship between the citizen and the state; (3) New institutional order,
96
Consolidating the Revolution 97
including new ministries, legal structures, and processes so that the Revolu-
tion did not depend only on Fidel’s charisma; (4) Economics, reconstituting
the economy in a way that engendered growth with equity and enabled the
government to satisfy everyone’s basic human needs. We will explore how
they pursued the goals of the first two realms in this chapter, and examine the
other two in the next chapter.
CULTURE
Especially in the early years, the possibility that Cubans actually could
achieve the revolution of their dreams had to be sustained largely by faith,
not results. Revolutionary change would entail sacrifices: the middle and
upper classes would lose wealth, privileges, and status; workers and peas-
ants would be deprived of normalcy, some of their values would be chal-
lenged, and demands for nonpaid “social labor” would disrupt routines of
daily life. Clashes with the United States would involve the loss of life and
could cause the economy to suffer. This made Fidel Castro’s charismatic
leadership essential to the success of the Revolution, infusing it with a
messianic energy.
Ever since the 1960s, when American pundits began to misapply the con-
cept of “charisma” to characterize the handsome President John F. Kennedy,
the term has been casually used to describe anyone who seems to make a
crowd swoon. But true charisma is a rare power that the populace itself
grants to a leader, and it is achieved only when followers believe the leader
shares their values and goals. “Charisma implies a social relation between
leader and followers,” sociologist Nelson Valdés explains.3 In turn, the pub-
lic accepts and reveres the charismatic leader with a blindness akin to faith.
Historian Oscar Zanetti further explains: “In the context of a fluid social
situation, with the old political system in crisis and its institutions falling
apart, the personality of Fidel Castro was decisive for the consolidation and
development of the revolutionary process.”4
There is no question that Fidel Castro had the captivating public persona,
private beguiling charm, and fierce determination that gave him the capacity
to be a charismatic leader. Fidel also acquired a godlike imprimatur due to a
remarkable coincidence—or perhaps skillful animal training. On January 8,
1959, as he began a two-hour speech at the old military command center in
Havana, a dove landed on his shoulder and remained perched there. In the
Santeria religion—a mixture of Catholic traditions and West African, Yoruba-
based rituals widely practiced in Cuba—“a white dove represents the divinity
Obatalá,” a king among the gods.5 And thus was Fidel divinely anointed.
98 Chapter 9
The revolutionary leaders understood the importance of symbols as a

source of inspiration, legitimacy, and shared experience. They placed seem-
ingly insignificant items, such as the handkerchief that Che Guevara used
in the mountains, in a new museum commemorating the Revolution. The
date of the failed 1953 Moncada attack became a national holiday and the
Granma—the boat on which Fidel and company sailed from Mexico to Cuba
in 1956—was enshrined prominently on a major artery in Old Havana.
Creating the New Cuban

At its core, the Cuban Revolution sought to put into practice an egalitarian
vision, which contributed to its worldwide attractiveness. The vision is based
on the Enlightenment assumption that while human beings are “perfectible,”
their institutions make them imperfect. Socialists, such as Che, who hold this
view of human potential assert that people are inclined by their very nature
to act with a social conscience for the collective benefit of the whole society.
From this perspective, when members of a society act selfishly, greedily, or
without concern for the welfare of others, their behavior is unnatural or alien
to their true self.
Egalitarians recognize that the human instinct for survival may drive
people to be self-seeking in the face of scarcity. But if a society can produce
enough for everyone’s basic needs yet chooses to create pockets of scar-
city through unequal distribution, then the source of the selfishness is the
society’s institutions and the laws and norms that regulate and protect the
institutions. In turn, such laws and norms lead people to focus exclusively
on their individual needs—whether these are real or apparent—in order to
compete with each other or to use others for their own gain. In this process,
people become alienated from their full human potential, which can be
realized only within a context of institutions that encourage sharing and a
regard for everyone’s well-being.
But how could the revolutionaries hope to create a culture oriented to col-
lective welfare with people who had been acculturated to individualistic values
of the old society, who believed that selfishness, acquisitiveness, and a dog-
eat-dog world were the natural order? Che Guevara responded that they had
to recognize that the “flaws of the past are translated into the present in the
individual consciousness,” and as a result the character of Cubans reflected an
“unmade quality.” The goal would be to create “a new man.”6 (As was com-
mon at the time, Cuban leaders used the gendered term “hombre” or “man” in
referring to all people.) Cubans with a new consciousness would eschew “the
satisfaction of their personal ambitions,” Guevara wrote in 1965, and “become
more aware every day of the need to incorporate themselves into society.”7
Ernesto “Che” Guevara
Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928, in Argentina,
where he trained as a medical doctor. He was in Guatemala in 1954 when
US-backed military officers staged a coup against the democratically elected
government, and moved to Mexico where he met Fidel and Raúl Castro in July
1955. Accompanying them on the Granma, which brought the revolutionary
fighters to Cuba in 1956, Guevara became a commander during the ensuing
guerrilla war and a leader in the Revolutionary government.
As one of the principal theorists of Cuban revolutionary ideology, Guevara
articulated the concept of the foco, believing that a small group of dedicated
guerrilla fighters could spark a revolution in a country where the conditions
were “ripe.” In Cuba, he was the leading advocate for the development of the
“new Cuban man”—a person who placed the collective welfare ahead of self-
interest—in order to bring about a humane and just society.
Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to work with independence and insurgent move-
ments in Africa. He returned briefly in 1966, and then went to fight against the
Bolivian government. Bolivian rangers, aided by US intelligence operatives,
ambushed him on October 8, 1967, and executed him the next day. In his
honor, Fidel proclaimed 1968 as the “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla” and Cuba
has designated October 8 as the “Day of the Heroic Guerrilla.”
The aspiration to create the new Cuban man effectively served as the cul-
tural guidepost almost from the beginning of the Revolution, even though the
leaders did not at first articulate it.8 The transition process from the old to the
new Cuban man, Guevara asserted, required reeducation that should not take
place only in schools. Cubans needed to learn the meaning and practice of
the new morality repeatedly, through their daily activities and relationships.
In Guevara’s view, this approach necessitated the use of “moral incentives” to
motivate people, not “material incentives,” because material incentives would
tend to reinforce individualism and self-seeking gain.
A moral incentive is one that inspires a person to work harder or to act for
the benefit of society—for the communal good—on the basis of a nonmaterial
interest, such as patriotism, compassion, or solidarity. A material incentive is
a tangible reward—such as money or access to scarce goods—provided to
those who produce more, take on greater responsibilities or risks, or perform
essential tasks for society.
Differences within the leadership over using material or moral incentives
to develop the new society became a source of cleavage in the early 1960s. In
practice, the use of moral incentives is usually accompanied by inefficiency.
Appeals to a common purpose are less likely to engender consistent hard
work than differentiated rewards to individuals, especially those who had not
100 Chapter 9
yet developed the mind-set of the “new Cuban man.” The reliance on invoca-
tions to solidarity was likely to generate less output. For a poor country like
Cuba, reduced production meant fewer basic necessities would be available,
which could undermine popular support for the revolution itself. The debate
over using moral incentives is one that continues to frame Cuban develop-
ment decisions even today because the Cuban Revolution has maintained two
goals, which at times have been incompatible: economic growth and equity.9
Some scholars have asserted that Che Guevara was unique among the
founding revolutionaries as the main advocate for the use of moral incen-
tives.10 But Guevara’s viewpoint did not lose its potency when he left Cuba in
1965. Fidel Castro continued to be a forceful advocate for moral incentives.
“What is the duty of the revolution other than to strengthen awareness, raising
people’s moral values of all kinds?” he asked rhetorically in a 1968 speech.
“Money is still the means of obtaining many things: to go to the movies, to
go here and there . . . as a means of distribution, but it is a bitter transitional
instrument and an instrument that we must abolish.”11
A New Moral Order

At times the clash between the old and new cultures emerged as a contest
over the meaning of “civilization.” Historian Louis Pérez points out that the
revolutionaries sought “to rearrange in usable form the standards by which
to measure civilization and in the process summon a vision of an alternative
moral order.”12 They argued that the level of civilization should be gauged
by the percentage of people who were illiterate and unemployed, and by the
number of children who suffered from parasites, not by the extent to which
Cubans had access to appliances and other conveniences that might enable
them to live comfortably.
Still, at first, officials did not try to bring about the new moral order in a
draconian way, by imposing rigid cultural strictures on writers and artists.
On the contrary, the early years of the revolution unleashed an enormous
outpouring of vibrant cultural expression in search of a distinctive Cuban
culture.13 Cubans were treated to a lush array of creativity in films, the
plastic arts, theater, dance, television and radio programs, magazines and
books, and music.
Nueva trova, or the new folksong, became a vehicle for expressing a revo-
lutionary spirit, and Cuban folk songs soon became popular internationally
as an expression of political protest. Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez
sang songs about personal and political liberation. The government promoted
Afro-Cuban rhythms as a way of replacing the cha-cha and big band tunes
that had appealed to American tourists.
The official newspaper of the July 26th Movement, Revolución, included

a literary supplement every Monday—Lunes de Revolución—which quickly
gained international acclaim as the most widely read literary supplement in
Latin America.14 Revolución’s editor, Carlos Franqui, had aspired to be minis-
ter of culture. Instead, Castro gave him license to create a world-class literary
magazine. Franqui envisioned the publication would be at the forefront of a
Cuban cultural revolution.15
Led by acclaimed writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his deputy, the
poet, playwright, and novelist Pablo Armando Fernández, Lunes attracted
prominent international contributors: existential philosophers such as Jean-
Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Latin American literary giants such as Pablo
Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Law-
rence Ferlinghetti, and feminist advocates such as Virginia Woolf and Simone
de Beauvoir. The subject matter in Lunes ranged widely as it covered all of
the arts. The magazine also established a record company and a publishing
house, and produced a weekly television program that featured modern plays,
jazz, and experimental films. In effect, Lunes became the main forum for
debates about Cuban culture and identity.16
Pablo Armando Fernández Poem*
En voz baja decir, amor, tu nombre Quietly, my love, to speak your name
junto a ti, a tus oídos, a tu boca. next to you, to your ear, to your mouth.
Y ser ese animal And be that happy animal,
feliz, que junta sus mitades. which joins its halves.
En voz baja o sin ella, muda Quietly or silently, the voiceless mouth
la boca revertida a su unidad: restored its unity:
silencio inaugural que a verbo y carne inaugural silence which grants new life
otorga nueva vida. to the word and the flesh.
Los ojos, ciegos, de regreso al todo: The eyes, blind, returning to the whole:
luz revelando mundos light revealing worlds
como fueron o son, como serán. as they were or are, as they shall be.
Vueltos a ser alegria del otro, Back to being each other’s joy,
uno consigo mismo en companía. be oneself in company.
Una vida otra: la tuya, tan amada. Another life: yours, so beloved.
Volver a ser origen sin tristeza Back to being origin without sadness
o dolor, sin miedo, sin nostalgia, o or pain, without fear, nor nostalgia,
con ellos: or with them:
tu y yo, nuestros recuerdos y cenizas. you and I, our memories and ashes.
* From “Suite Para Maruja” in Learning to Die, trans. John Brotherton (Havana: Instituto Cubano
del Libro, 1995).
102 Chapter 9
The explosion of creativity inevitably ran the risk of challenging the gov-
ernment’s determination to maintain unity. The Cuban government’s strategy
to defend the island from a feared US attack centered on the idea of a “peo-
ple’s war” against the invaders. Toward this end, in the fall of 1959 it created
a militia made up of volunteers. Yet the central element of the government’s
strategy was the assumption that the United States would be deterred from
invading if the country appeared unified. Unity thus became a singular goal
and officials viewed dissent as a vital threat. In pursuit of unity, the govern-
ment began to assert that the Revolution and la patria were one and the same.
This new meaning for Cuban nationalism made criticism of the Revolution
nearly equivalent to treason against the nation.17 Recall, though, that an em-
phasis on unity was not unique to Fidel and the July 26th Movement. It had
been preached by Martí and George Washington for similar strategic reasons.
The rebel leaders also sought unity in order for the government to provide
services and goods efficiently, especially to the large part of the population
that had been underserved previously. This aim, they reasoned, could not
be achieved if there were factional strife and political stalemate.18 The re-
sulting measures aimed at generating unity left an indelible imprint on the
Cuban Revolution.
Repression
By 1961, the leadership began to view independent intellectuals as a
threat, because they could undermine both the “faith” of believers and, in
turn, the Revolution’s fragile unity. In June 1961, Fidel indicated that the
government’s limits of tolerance had been reached. During the course of a
three-day meeting with “intellectuals,” he laid down a new principle. “We
do not forbid anyone from writing on any subject he chooses,” the Cuban
leader said, “or in the manner he considers appropriate.” The Revolution,
he asserted, must give an opportunity to all “honest” writers and artists,
even to those who were not animated by a “revolutionary spirit,” to express
themselves freely and to use their creativity. But this freedom would be
available only if their creative work was consistent with the Revolution.
Castro tersely summarized the rule by declaring, “within the revolution,
everything; against the revolution, nothing.”19
The phrase left writers and artists confused and apprehensive. The Cuban
leader had not specified what was to be considered “within” or “against” the
Revolution. Without guidelines, lesser officials enforced Castro’s dictum ar-
bitrarily, which had the effect of stifling freedom of expression. In an evoca-
tive passage from The Man Who Loved Dogs, prize-winning Cuban novelist
Leonardo Padura described how Fidel’s order impacted one “fictional” writer
who had submitted a story to his university’s literary magazine. “‘How dare
you turn this in?’” the magazine’s director said “in a rage.”
[T]hat story was inopportune, unpublishable, completely inconceivable, almost

counterrevolutionary—and hearing that word, as you can imagine, caused a
chill. . . . That day what really happened was that they fucked me for the rest
of my life, since . . . I left there deeply convinced that my story should never
have been written, which is the worst thing that they can make a writer think.20
Stifled expression was the effect that Fidel likely intended, as he sent a
clearer message in this regard by closing down Lunes de Revolución in No-
vember 1961. Carlos Franqui left the country, along with other prominent writ-
ers. The government offered a soft exile for Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Pablo
Armando Fernández, and poet Héberto Padilla. They became cultural attachés
in the Cuban embassies in Brussels, London, and Moscow, respectively.
While some repression was justified at first by the goal of avoiding stale-
mate, it soon became routine. Spurred on by the seeming demands of national
security, the state’s repressive apparatus came to eclipse other claims for
resources. Fear replaced hope as petty bureaucrats were given license to exag-
gerate threats or engage in spiteful acts of cruelty.
The height of repression came in the early 1960s. Just prior to the 1961 US-
sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban government arrested thousands of
people in a roundup intended to prevent the invaders from linking up with
internal fighters. While most were released quickly, Fidel acknowledged in
1965 that twenty thousand political prisoners continued to be incarcerated.21
Late in that year, the military began to “draft” thousands of people whom
the regime designated as “socially deviant”: Jehovah’s Witnesses and other
religious missionaries, homosexuals, and “vagrants.” They were placed in
prison-like camps euphemistically dubbed “Military Units to Aid Production”
(UMAP). Ordered to do nonremunerated labor, the prisoners were ostensibly
in the camps to be reeducated. The UMAP program lasted for two years. The
government disbanded it in 1967 after the Cuban National Union of Writers
and Artists protested the drafting of writers and university professors.22
Relations with the Church Sour

Initially the new regime did not perceive the Catholic Church as a threat.
Even though Cardinal Manuel Arteaga y Betancourt had close ties to Batista,
he “was also on very good official terms with the Revolutionary Govern-
ment,” Fidel Castro remarked in a 1985 interview with a Brazilian priest,
Frei Betto.23 In fact, historian Margaret Crahan has noted, “there had been
fairly widespread support on the part of the churches for the overthrow of
104 Chapter 9
the Batista dictatorship.”24 Yet the Catholic Church was unprepared for the
extent of socioeconomic changes the revolutionaries would undertake, which
affected the holdings of foreign entities to which many Church officials were
tied. About five of every six priests among the three thousand in Cuba were
from Spain. Castro remarked, in this vein, that “The revolutionary laws pro-
duced conflicts, without a doubt, because the bourgeois and landed sectors,
the rich sectors, changed their attitude toward the Revolution. . . . That’s how
initial conflicts with the Church began, because those sectors wanted to use
the Church as a tool against the Revolution.”25
Tension came to a head in August 1960, as a majority of bishops approved
a pastoral letter declaring that communism and Catholicism were incompat-
ible. The letter reflected increasingly outspoken charges that the government
had become infiltrated with communists.26 At about the same time, Father
John Walsh, a US priest, began working with Cuban churches on a CIA-
sponsored program that used children as pawns to sow fear and dissent within
Cuba in order to undermine the government’s legitimacy.
Called “Operation Peter Pan,” the project began with a scare campaign. Ac-
cording to Antonio Veciana, a leader in the underground terrorist organization
Alpha 66, he and CIA operative David Atlee Phillips spread false rumors that
the Cuban government planned to abolish parental rights, remove children
from their homes—especially those in religious families—and dispatch them
to the Soviet Union where they would be indoctrinated with Marxist-Leninist
dogma.27 Local parishes then offered the frightened families a chance to send
their children to the United States where they supposedly would be cared
for by well-intentioned US Catholic groups enlisted by the CIA and State
Department. More than fourteen thousand children between the ages of six
and sixteen traveled unaccompanied by their parents, most without relatives
waiting for them in the United States. Some never saw their parents again.28
POLITICS
New Government
On January 2, 1959, the day after Batista fled and his government collapsed,
the July 26th Movement installed Manuel Urrutia Lleó as provisional presi-
dent and José Miró Cardona as prime minister. They headed a coalition cabi-
net that assumed both executive and legislative powers. Urrutia had been a
moderate judge whose sympathies lay with the July 26th Movement, but who
had not been politically active. His father had been a major in the Indepen-
dence War against Spain, but he imagined his role essentially as symbolic.
He enjoyed rising late, had no taste for political battle, and was fixated on the
singular goal of ridding the island of vices such as gambling. Miró Cardona
was president of the national bar association (formally, the Cuban College of
Lawyers) and had been one of Fidel Castro’s law school professors. A civil
libertarian, he had refused to accept many of the demands Batista sought to
impose on the judiciary, and had attempted to fashion a “Civic Dialogue.”29
Below them, a range of Batista’s opponents took seats in the new cabinet,
which moderate reformers dominated. It included only a few members of the
July 26th Movement, such as Armando Hart and Enrique Oltuski, or close
collaborators, such as Faustino Pérez. Fidel claimed he did not want a govern-
ment post, but Urrutia named him commander-in-chief of the armed forces.30
The coalition did not hold together for long. Barely one month after its
formation, Miró Cardona relinquished his position. Arguing that Fidel effec-
tively was running the government, the departing prime minister said that the
rebel leader might as well hold the official title. Castro accepted the position,
on the condition that he would chair cabinet meetings and that Urrutia could
not attend them.31 In May 1959, the cabinet replaced Urrutia with Osvaldo
Dortícos Torrado. An upper-class lawyer, Dortícos already had served the
new government as minister of justice.
In October, a cabinet shuffle brought in Raúl Castro as minister of defense,
moving Fidel loyalist Augusto Martínez Sánchez to the Ministry of Labor. The
next month Faustino Pérez and Manuel Ray resigned their ministerial posts.
Pérez had been in charge of cataloging and distributing properties owned by
Batista and his cohorts; Ray was in charge of public works. Seventeen months
later, Ray was one of the commanders in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
By the beginning of 1960, nearly all of the moderates were gone from the
cabinet. With defections seeming to occur daily, the situation provided an
opportunity for former PSP adversaries of the July 26th Movement to ingrati-
ate themselves with the new leaders. They had been left out of the coalition
initially but had no interest in joining defectors who were headed to exile in
the United States. Their steady accumulation of influence in 1960 in turn led
to outright opposition by some anti-communist moderates.
Military
Perhaps the most dramatic early rejection came from Húber Matos, a former
rice grower who had risen to the rank of comandante (major) in the rebel
army and was serving as the military governor of Camagüey Province.
Matos felt especially aggrieved by the new government’s agrarian reforms,
which he viewed as evidence that communists had seized control of the
Revolution. On October 19, 1959, he resigned his post and several of his
lieutenants left with him.
106 Chapter 9
To Fidel and Raúl, the resignations were an ominous threat to the country’s
stability in its heartland, in part because of Camagüey’s economic importance
as a source of cattle for the country.32 The day after Matos resigned, Fidel sent
Camilo Cienfuegos, the army chief of staff, to arrest the dissident major in his
home. Speaking to a rally of half a million people, the prime minister asserted
that Matos was a “traitor” who intended “to use soldiers against the Revolu-
tion, against the rights of the Cuban people.”33 A court convicted Matos of
treason and he served twenty years in prison.
Matos’s departure highlighted a challenge the revolutionary government
faced in constituting a new national army. It certainly was not going to use
senior officers in the hated Batista military, which numbered 18,500 troops
when his government fell.34 But the victorious rebel army was less than half
that size at the time of the Revolution. Nevertheless, it became the corner-
stone of Cuba’s new military, the Fuerzas Armadas de la Revolucion (FAR) or
the Revolutionary Armed Forces. In addition, in the wake of Matos’s arrest,
Fidel announced on October 26 the creation of the National Revolutionary
Militia, a people’s army.
Raúl Castro took the central role of transforming the rebel forces into a
professional institution within three years, expanding it to about 300,000
members at its largest.35 While some have attributed the makeover to the or-
ganizational help of the Soviet Union, it actually happened before the Soviet
Union came on the scene in a major way. By 1962, the militia numbered
nearly 150,000 members.
The most difficult campaign that the new army faced was the seven-year
war against counterrevolutionaries, most of whom operated out of the Escam-
bray Mountains in west central Cuba.36 From 1959 to 1966, various groups of
“bandidos”—as Fidel dismissively labeled them37—engaged in a variety of
attacks that today most Americans would describe as terrorism. They not only
killed Cuban soldiers and militia, but also volunteer teachers; they detonated
bombs in factories and stores, burned crops, and destroyed aqueducts and
electric transmission lines.38
General Fabián Escalante Font, a former head of Cuban counterintel-
ligence, asserts that during the seven-year period, these groups committed
5,780 acts of terror, of which 716 were acts of sabotage against industrial
sites.39 While former Batista officers and officials did make up the initial
counterrevolutionary units, some wealthy Cubans who had opposed the
Batista dictatorship began to take up arms against the new regime as it na-
tionalized more property and increased the distribution of wealth. Veteran
journalist Richard Gott identifies an additional factor leading to counter-
revolution: “The old elite . . . was also alarmed by the way in which the
Revolution had allowed the black population, hitherto largely invisible, to
Destruction of La Coubre
On March 4, 1960, an explosion in Havana harbor destroyed the French

freighter La Coubre, killing more than eighty people and wounding more
than three hundred. Dockworkers had been unloading from the ship tons of
Belgian-made munitions the Cuban government had purchased. Fidel Castro
blamed the CIA. The United States denied the charges of CIA involvement,
and the cause of the blast has never been determined definitively.* The fol-
lowing day, Castro declared a national day of mourning. At the funeral, he
declared for the first time a refrain that became a national slogan, ¡Patria o
Muerte, venceremos! (Homeland or Death, we will be victorious!).
* R. Hart Phillips, “Castro Links U.S. to Ship ‘Sabotage’; Denial Is Swift,” New York Times, March
6, 1960, 1; Carlos Alzugaray and Anthony C. E. Quainton, “Cuban-U.S. Relations: The Terrorism
Dimension,” Pensamiento Propio, no. 34 (July–December 2011): 72.
emerge onto the stage.”40 During a 1996 conference about the Bay of Pigs,
exiled militants estimated that there may have been as many as ten thou-
sand armed fighters among the various resistance groups, and one hundred
thousand supporters of the counterrevolution.41
Two of the most important groups were backed by the Catholic Church:
the Movement to Recover the Revolution (Movimiento de Recuperación
Revolucionaria, or MRR) and the Christian Democratic Movement (Mov-
imiento Demócrata Cristiano, or MDC), both of which began to receive
covert funding in 1960 from the CIA. The MRR emerged in December
1959 from the Comandos Rurales, or Rural Commandos, an organization of
Catholic activists with an avowed mission to teach literacy to the counter-
revolutionaries. Its founder was Manuel Artime Buesa—a lieutenant in the
Rural Commandos who previously had been designated to be a provincial
agrarian reform manager. But he feared the agrarian reform process would
go too far, and hoped to use the MRR as the base to fight for his own vision
of a Cuban revolution.42
By mid-1960, most of the groups were coordinating plans under the
umbrella of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (Frente Revolucionario
Democrático, or FRD), and the new organization selected Artime, the MRR
leader, as its national coordinator. But once the CIA became involved, the
autonomy of the Cuban counterrevolutionaries essentially ended. Lino
Fernández, a medical doctor and the military commander of the MRR, com-
mented in 1996 that “the idea of calling the internal resistance and giving us
control of the Cuban fight was inconceivable to the CIA. The CIA tried to do
everything themselves. . . . It was almost—again I speak as a psychiatrist—
pathological.”43
108 Chapter 9
By 1962, Raúl’s organizational success had produced an efficient force that

was versatile enough to perform important nonmilitary functions: building
roads and infrastructure, helping to distribute goods, and providing for health
care, especially important because so many Cuban doctors already had emi-
grated to the United States. As Hal Klepak explains, Fidel Castro turned to the
military for a large number of tasks because he wanted “people he could trust
in positions of importance, especially those such as agrarian reform where US
and local opposition was soon strong and always vocal.” But given the small
size of the FAR, his choices were limited. Klepak notes that as a result, young
soldiers “took over portfolios for which they often had little or no training.
Loyalty to the comandante and to his revolutionary program counted for more
than efficiency in these trying but heady days.”44
NOTES
1. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 482–83.

3. Nelson P. Valdés, “The Revolutionary and Political Content of Fidel Castro’s
Charismatic Authority,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolu-
tion, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 28.
4. Zanetti, Historia Mínima de Cuba, chapter 9. [Authors’ translation.]
5. Ivor L. Miller, “Religious Symbolism in Cuban Political Performance,” TDR:
The Drama Review 44, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 30.
6. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” in Man and Socialism
in Cuba: The Great Debate, ed. Bertram Silverman (New York: Atheneum, 1973),
341–43.
7. Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” 343–44.
9. María del Carmen Zabala Argüelles, “Poverty and Vulnerability in Cuba To-
day,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip
Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 191–93.
10. See, for example, Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che
Guevara (New York: Vintage, 1998); Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Social-
ist Cuba: A Two Decade Appraisal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1981), 23–32.
11. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Commemorating the 11th Anniversary of the March
13, 1957, Action Held at the Steps of the University of Havana,” March 13, 1968 [au-
thors’ translation], http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1968/esp/f130368e.html.
Also see Julie Marie Buncke, Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture
in Cuba (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).
12. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 482. Also see Bertram Silverman, “Introduction:
The Great Debate in Retrospect: Economic Rationality and the Ethics of Revolution,” in
Bertram Silverman, ed., Man and Socialism in Cuba (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 15.
13. Ana Serra, The “New Man” in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the Revolution
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 2–3.
15. Interview with Pablo Armando Fernández, January 8, 1992, Havana, Cuba.
16. William Luis, “Exhuming Lunes de Revolución,” CR: The New Centennial
Review 2, no. 2 (Summer 2002).
17. Valdés, “The Revolutionary and Political Content of Fidel Castro’s Charis-
matic Authority,” 30, 32, 34.
18. Jesús Arboleya, The Cuban Counterrevolution, trans. Rafael Betancourt (Colum-
bus: Ohio University Press, 2000), 46, 50; Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso para Respaldar
las Nuevas Tarifas Telefonicas y la Intervencion, Efectuada en el Teatro de la CTC,”
March 6, 1959, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f060359e.html.
19. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso como Conclusion de las Reuniones con los In-
telectuales Cubanos,” June 16, 23, and 30, 1961.” Translation by the authors. http://
www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f300661e.html.
20. Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs, trans. Anna Kushner (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 70–71.
22. Larry Oberg, “The Status of Gays in Cuba: Myth and Reality,” in A Contem-
porary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Domínguez, Cuba, 356–57.
23. Betto, Fidel and Religion (Havana: Publications Office of the Council of State,
1987), 194.
24. Margaret E. Crahan, “Freedom of Worship in Revolutionary Cuba,” in The
Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New
York: Grove, 1988), 212.
25. Betto, Fidel and Religion, 195.
26. Joseph Holbrook, “The Catholic Church in Cuba, 1959–1962: The Clash
of Ideologies,” International Journal of Cuban Studies 2, no. 3/4 (Autumn/Winter
2010): 270–71.
27. Saul Landau, “The Confessions of Antonio Veciana,” Counterpunch, March
12, 2010.
28. María de los Angeles Torres, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban
Children in the US, and the Promise of a Better Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 8.
29. Thomas, Cuba, 1065–66.
30. Zanetti, Historia Mínima de Cuba, chapter 9.
31. Thomas, Cuba, 1197.
32. Herbert L. Matthews, Revolution in Cuba: An Essay in Understanding (New
York: Scribner, 1975), 138–40.
33. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” October 26, 1959, http://www.cuba.cu/gobi
erno/discursos/1959/esp/f261059e.html; Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con
Fidel—1959 (Havana: Fundacion de la Naturaleza y el Hombre, 1998), 323–40.
35. Hal Klepak, Raúl Castro and Cuba: A Military Story (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 23–26.
110 Chapter 9
36. Norberto Fuentes, Nos Impusieron la Violencia (Havana: Editorial Letras

Cubanas, 1986).
37. Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con Fidel—1961 (Havana: Fundacion de
la Naturaleza y el Hombre, 1998), 33.
38. Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con Fidel—1961, 34.
39. Fabían Escalante Font, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations against Cuba,
1959–1962, trans. Maxine Shaw (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), 152.
41. James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs
Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 19–21.
42. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 174–75; US Congress, House Select
Committee on Assassination, 1979. “Investigation of the Assassination of President
John F. Kennedy,” vol. X: Appendix to Hearings, March, 7.
43. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 13.
44. Hal Klepak, “The Revolutionary Armed Forces: Loyalty and Efficiency
in the Face of Old and New Challenges,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The
Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2014), 74.
Chapter 10
Consolidating the Revolution

Economic Reforms, New Institutions,
and Basic Needs
NO ROAD MAP TO GUIDE PLANS

FOR DEVELOPMENT WITH EQUITY
US vice president Richard M. Nixon was prepared to encounter anti-US dem-

onstrations when he traveled to eight South American countries on a goodwill
tour in April and May 1958. After all, the purpose of the trip was to assuage
some of the hostility toward the United States that had been growing in the
region.1 But he was not expecting the depth of antagonism he experienced in
Venezuela on May 13, when four thousand people attacked his motorcade with
rocks, eggs, tomatoes, and spit. With only twelve Secret Service agents to pro-
tect him, demonstrators nearly succeeded in turning over his car.
A shocked President Eisenhower then sent his brother, Milton Eisenhower,
to the region to discern the root cause of such vehement anti-Americanism.
In a report released on December 27, 1958—four days before Batista fled
Cuba—Dr. Eisenhower provided a stark picture of despair and turbulence,
much of which could have described Cuba as well:
Latin America is a continental area in ferment. While its productivity is increas-

ing, so is its population, at an unprecedented rate. A high degree of illiteracy,
poverty, and dependence on one-commodity economies with consequent wide
fluctuations in income still characterize most of this vast area. But the people
generally, including the most humble of them, now know that low standards of
living are neither universal nor inevitable, and they are therefore impatiently
insistent that remedial actions be taken.2
In terms of standard indicators such as per capita income, literacy, infant

mortality, and life expectancy, Cuba actually ranked among the top five
111
112 Chapter 10
countries in Latin America.3 But it was hardly thriving. Most Cubans suf-
fered from declining real wages as the cost of basic goods increased faster
than wages, which contributed to a growing and unsustainable income gap
between rich and poor. More than 40 percent of Cuban workers in 1958 were
either underemployed or unemployed (the official unemployment rate in
1958 was 16 percent).4
Recall from chapter 6 that sugar cane workers made up approximately 25
percent of the national labor force, and averaged less than four months of
work each year. Cuba’s literacy rate was only 75 percent while thousands of
teachers were unemployed. Advanced medical services were concentrated in
Havana and unavailable to most Cubans. Inequities between the rich and poor
were reflected not only in housing, education, health care, and other basic
services, but more generally in the aspirations of urban and rural Cubans.
There was no map to guide the revolutionaries, no example of a poor
country that had been able to achieve both sustained economic growth and
an end to inequality in a short time. One possibility was a strategy called
“import-substitution industrialization” (ISI) to which several Latin American
countries had been attracted. It was based on the premise that third world
countries remained poor because advanced capitalist nations took advantage
of them in their trade relationships: the richer countries purchased commodi-
ties (coffee, sugar, copper, wood, rubber, and the like) at low and declining
prices, and in turn sold finished products using these commodities back to
the poorer countries at increasingly higher prices. One solution to this struc-
tural disadvantage seemed to be for the poor countries to produce industrial
products themselves. In fact, ISI was the strategy the United States followed
in its early days in order to overcome its dependency on Great Britain, which
purchased the largest share of US agricultural exports such as cotton and had
been the main source of finished goods imported by the United States.
While no Latin American country had been successful in using the ISI
strategy, it was the most attractive model to the new Cuban leaders. They be-
lieved that the fundamental obstacle to the country’s economic growth was its
reliance on sugar for export earnings and its dependent relationship with the
United States. In addition, they were not enamored of the rigid Soviet model
of state planning and centralized control, or the Chinese model of extreme
collectivization. Those models seemed inapplicable to Cuba. Both of these
large countries had populations vastly greater than Cuba’s, and possessed
natural resources—especially sources of energy—that enabled them to rely
less on imports than Cuba did.
Yet the revolutionary government chose to institute other changes before
diversifying what Cuba produced and reducing what it needed to import.
Look at Me
Figure 10.1. Campesino husband, wife, two daughters, and their friends, Matan-
zas Province, 1974. Photo by Philip Brenner.
On a trip through rural Matanzas Province in 1974, Philip Brenner stopped

unannounced late one afternoon at the home of a farm worker. His house
had a thatched roof with sides and floors made of wooden boards. In front,
there was a small garden featuring a banana and a lemon tree. A tall, thin
man with a broad, toothless grin opened the door. Inside, his two young
children played with friends in the eight-by-ten-foot entrance hallway that
served as the living room. His wife was in the kitchen at the back of the liv-
ing room. After some chitchat, Brenner began his questioning in the manner
of a probing investigative reporter. Did the man support the Cuban revolu-
tion? Brenner asked. A blank stare. The thin man blinked his eyes. He could
not fathom the stupidity of the question. “Look at me,” he began calmly.
He was thirty-five but looked a haggard sixty-year-old. “Look at my healthy
children,” he exclaimed. “Look at this house—it has solid walls and a floor.”
The government provided the wood, nails, and tools; he and his neighbors
built the house in a weekend. He and his wife had their own bedroom. There
is a paved road in front of their house, a school to which their children can
walk in five minutes, and a medical clinic nearby that obviously did not
exist when the man was growing up in this area. “Yes, I support the Cuban
revolution.” He smiled.
114 Chapter 10
These reforms created a dynamic that ultimately limited the options Cuba
could choose in attempting to advance growth with equity.
MAJOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGES
Agrarian Reform Law

Land reform had been a high priority for the July 26th Movement because of
the high concentration of land ownership in Cuba. Only twenty-two latifun-
dio (plantations) controlled more than 70 percent of the land used for produc-
ing sugar.5 But the aim of redistributing property was hardly a novel or even
radical objective. Cuba’s Ortodoxo Party had long advocated land reform. In
the early 1960s, the Alliance for Progress, a hemisphere-wide development
program that the United States spearheaded, sought to break up large planta-
tions in Latin America and distribute land to individual farmers. Defending
the Alliance’s goals on its first anniversary in 1962, President John F. Ken-
nedy declared, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make
violent revolution inevitable.”6
In May 1959, the revolutionary government announced an Agrarian Re-
form Law that limited the maximum landholding size to one thousand acres.7
The government parceled out land in excess of that acreage to farm workers.
About 100,000 rural farm workers each received sixty-six acres free under
this “land-to-the-tiller” program.8 At the same time, the government took con-
trol of 40 percent of Cuba’s rural property, creating large state farms. Work-
ers on state farms received a salary throughout the year, which significantly
raised their standard of living.
Instituting land reform also involved the creation of new towns in the
countryside. From 1959 to 1962, the government built eighty-three towns,
each with three hundred to five hundred residents. The settlements offered
basic services, such as schools and health care, that previously only had been
found in urban areas. Indeed, the goal of agrarian reform was not merely
redistribution of land. “Fidel and his comrades,” according to Antonio Nuñez
Jiménez, the first head of the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA)
and a Fidel Castro confidant, were concerned about “the precarious health of
the peasants,” which they reasoned was a consequence of a lack of adequate
sanitation, electricity, and communications in the countryside.9 Sociologist
Susan Eckstein notes that in 1958 “less than ten percent of rural homes had
electricity, and less than three percent had indoor plumbing.” In all of Cuba’s
rural areas, there were only three general hospitals.10
At the same time, rents for most urban dwellers were cut by 50 percent as
the government limited what a landlord could charge for an apartment. It also
required Cubans owning more than two properties to hand over the excess to
the government, which then classified them as social property. Large houses,
for example, were transformed into day care centers. In October 1960, under
the Urban Reform Law, the government took over all rental property and
established that rent would be no more than 10 percent of a tenant’s income.
By the end of 1960, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population had
lost nearly all of their property, privileges, and political power. They were
forced to pay new luxury taxes; their private schools and clubs were closed;
private beaches were opened to the public; private clinics were forced to
treat indigent patients. In turn, the lower classes—especially urban Afro-
Cubans and all those in rural areas—received immediate benefits because
historically they had suffered the greatest unemployment and had received
the fewest public services.
Making Lemonade from a Lemon

The 1959 Agrarian Reform Law proved to be a turning point for the Cuban
elite. A few began to organize themselves to wage a counterrevolutionary
war against the new government. Many others voted with their feet, leav-
ing Cuba. The emigration of skilled Cubans affected the Revolution in both
negative and positive ways. On the one hand, the loss of doctors, teachers,
and technicians deprived the country of essential expertise needed for de-
velopment. With novices replacing experienced government planners and
administrators, key services became unavailable or were provided poorly.
Militants who were barely into their twenties and accustomed to guerrilla
informality quickly found themselves overwhelmed by bureaucratic rules
Death of a Bureaucrat
In his 1966 film, Death of a Bureaucrat, acclaimed Cuban director Tomás

Gutiérrez Alea mocked bureaucratic logjams Cubans were experiencing.
When an exemplary worker dies, his family honors his dedication by bury-
ing him with his worker identification card. Problems arise when they need
the ID in order to obtain a new ration card to purchase food. The sons opt to
exhume their father’s body to obtain the card. But before they can return the
cadaver to its grave, a policeman wanders by, and so they run off with it to
their home. When they try formally to return the body, an official tells them
that it cannot be reburied because there was no record of the dead man being
exhumed. In one evocative scene, an uncle attempts to locate a supervisor in
a large office building to solve the problem. Arriving at midday, he encounters
empty offices, rows of file cabinets, and a lone man with a broom, fruitlessly
sweeping a hallway strewn with papers flying all around.
116 Chapter 10
and impossible goals. As output dropped, the resulting serious shortage

of foreign exchange prevented the government from importing goods that
could provide for basic needs.
On the other hand, emigration gave the revolutionaries opportunities to
make lemonade from this lemon, to turn the loss into a positive for the Revo-
lution. Migration removed opponents who might have challenged the revo-
lutionary government had they stayed on the island, and it created a safety
valve that released pressure, which might have animated potential opponents
to organize themselves if the possibility of leaving did not exist.11
With this class of Cubans gone, the government could more easily forge
ahead with programs that would benefit a large majority of Cubans. As a re-
sult, enthusiasm was partly able to substitute for expertise. Cubans of all ages
willingly put in extra hours doing voluntary work as they shared in a com-
mon national experience to develop the country together. Everyone became a
teacher, sharing personal knowledge with someone less knowledgeable. Sixth
graders taught third graders and retired doctors taught medical students who,
in turn, trained new nurses. The most well known example of this phenom-
enon was the National Literacy Campaign.
Educational Change
Fidel Castro announced the literacy campaign in a UN address on September
26, 1960, setting a goal “of teaching every single inhabitant of the country to
read and write in one year.” This followed on what already had been a deter-
mined effort to direct resources toward educating children. Elementary school
enrollment jumped between 1958 and 1960 from 625,000 to more than one
million. The number of schoolteachers in the country increased by nearly 50
percent to 24,400; in rural areas, the number doubled to more than 10,000. At
the same time, the government built as many new rural classrooms as prior
governments had created in total during the prior fifty years.12
The ambitious effort to educate illiterate Cubans—to enable everyone
to read minimally at a first-grade level—mobilized nearly 250,000 people,
including 100,000 students mostly between the ages of ten and seventeen,
inspired by what Jonathan Kozol described as “a kind of ‘ethical exhilara-
tion.’”13 Young brigadistas were trained for a few weeks and then sent off
throughout the country, typically living with a family where there was an
illiterate person.14 This mode of teaching served many purposes.
There was a pedagogical rationale for the approach. Abel Prieto, who later
became minister of culture, explained in 1981 that “an illiterate is usually
embarrassed when another person thinks that he or she is ignorant. So it is
better to put the literacy worker into the house of the illiterate,” that is, into
Literacy Campaign
The teachers’ manual, Alfabeticemos (Let Us Teach Literacy), included guide-

lines (orientaciones) for helping the brigadistas work effectively with rural
Cubans. “Remember,” it cautions, “that many students have vision and hear-
ing defects that can make learning difficult.”* It also included brief lessons
about the goals of the Revolution and problems Cuba faced (see cover and
table of contents in figures 10.2 and 10.3), as well as a glossary of political
terms. The curriculum in the students’ workbook, ¡Venceremos! (We Shall
Overcome!), included some revolutionary sloganeering (“The fishermen’s
cooperative helps the fisherman. The fisherman is no longer exploited.”).
Exercises involved writing, using words in simple sentences, and repeating key
words to teach pronunciation.
Figure 10.2. Cover

(continued)
* Alfabeticemos: Manual para el Alfabetizador, Comisión Nacional de Alfabetización, Ministerio
de Educacion, Cuba, 1961 (copy in possession of the authors).
118 Chapter 10
Literacy Campaign (continued)
Figure 10.3. Table of contents

a comfortable environment rather than a traditional classroom.15 Indeed, a

brigade’s first task was to determine who lacked literacy in an area because
embarrassment kept people from identifying themselves as such. The cam-
paign ultimately determined there were 980,000 illiterate adults out of the
approximately four million adults in the country. When the National Literacy
Campaign ended after one year, Cuba’s literacy rate had skyrocketed to 96.1
percent, the highest in Latin America. Many Cubans were grateful for the
campaign’s efforts, as shown in the letter presented in figure 10.4.
The literacy campaign also served political objectives. By involving
so many people—the people who acquired literacy and their families, the
teachers and their families, and communities—it provided an example of
a collective effort that proved successful. The curriculum offered a way of
Figure 10.4. Letter from Julia Reyes Rodríguez to Prime Minister Fidel Castro Ruz,
written at the end of the 1961 Literacy Campaign; archived in the Museum of the
Literacy Campaign, Havana, Cuba. Photo by Sonya Grier. Translation by the authors:
Guanajay December 6, 1961, Dr Fidel Castro Ruz, Thank you very much for having said
that no Cuban should be left without learning to read because I knew nothing and now
I learned. Homeland or death we shall be victorious. Julia Reyes Rodríguez
120 Chapter 10
spreading the Revolution’s ideas to the countryside, and it helped the teachers
to develop a revolutionary consciousness. It also gave the urban brigadistas
an understanding about rural poverty that the Revolution was committed to
eradicating, as well as a meaningful experience with rural workers, which
helped to break down negative stereotypes.
Improving Health Care

Cuba has been acclaimed as a model for providing excellent health care
for all its citizens.16 While the revolutionary government deserves credit
for extending comprehensive care beyond the larger cities, such as Havana,
Santiago de Cuba, and Camagüey, the country’s health indicators in 1958 al-
ready were above average for Latin America. Previous governments also had
established a national public health service and a few mutual aid cooperatives
that functioned like health maintenance organizations.
This structure provided a basis for the revolutionary government to launch
an effort in 1962 to eradicate polio. Within one year, “Cuba became the first
country in the Americas and the second country in the world to effectively
eliminate” the disease, Marguerite Rose Jiménez reports.17 Notably, though,
the existing health system alone would not have enabled the country to
achieve this feat. Jiménez explains that the Cuban model, which the rest
of Latin America adopted in some version, also required central coordina-
tion, community mobilization, an extensive public education campaign, and
outreach to the entire population. Cuba’s achievement in eradicating polio
was made all the more remarkable by the fact that almost two-thirds of the
medical professionals—including more than 2,000 of the 6,300 doctors on the
island—left the country in the first few years of the Revolution.18
Providing Adequate Nutrition

Food was a thornier problem. As noted earlier, Cuba’s colonial relationship
with Spain and neocolonial relationship with the United States distorted its
agricultural production in favor of a single export crop—sugar—along with
tobacco. Small farmers did grow crops for their own subsistence. But even
if they had harvested more fruits and vegetables than they consumed, the
country lacked distribution networks to get the produce from farms to cities,
where the majority of Cubans lived.
Consider the Cuban diet today. Cubans tend not to favor fish—which is
plentiful in the sea around the island—because fish was not traditionally part
of a Cuban’s diet. There was no commercial fishing industry before the Revo-
lution, which would have been necessary for deliveries of sufficient quantities
in urban areas. As a consequence of its sugar monoculture, Cuba had to use
scarce hard currency resources to import food. In the early 1960s, as exports
declined so did food imports. Hunger became a serious concern, except for
those who could afford to buy imported food.
The revolutionary government’s partial solution was food rationing. To be
sure, other countries have relied on various types of rationing. During World
War II, US consumers could buy only limited amounts of items such as sugar,
butter, and gasoline, because of the need to divert supplies to the war effort.
Starting in 1962, Cuba used rationing to provide everyone with enough food
for a basic diet. The ration book, called a libreta, covered a large number of
items and was distributed to every household.19 But a family’s libreta was us-
able only at a designated store, and many times stores did not have the food
supposedly “guaranteed” by the program.
Shortages were acceptable, though, because they affected everyone, not
only the poor. Cuban officials demonstrably suffered too. Fidel, Raúl, and
Che were vigilant about avoiding the kind of corruption that delegitimated
reform and revolutionary governments elsewhere. Ultimately the system of
food rationing functioned well enough so that malnutrition disappeared in
Cuba until the 1990s.
ADDING ORDER TO REVOLUTIONARY FERVOR
Intent on bringing about change quickly, the revolutionary leaders made

decisions on the fly, continually experimenting as they simultaneously tried
to solve immediate problems and fashion a coherent plan for the country’s
development. In one case, the government hastily constructed a housing
complex at the edge of Havana for squatters from the countryside. The new
residents brought their farm animals with them—chickens, pigs, and even
cows—and within a year the complex became uninhabitable. Problems
arose as turf battles between ministries created duplication, waste, and inef-
ficiency.20 The leadership soon recognized that slogans, good intentions, and
trenchant critiques were not enough to transform the economy. They needed
new organizations to move the Revolution forward, and a set of rules to coor-
dinate the work of the new structures. The process of rationalization, adding
order to revolutionary fervor, began with the creation of several new minis-
tries, each empowered to control a critical aspect of the economy.
New Ministries
INRA, the agrarian reform institute, was foremost among the new ministries,
and it spawned several others: the Ministry of Industries (headed by Che Gue-
vara), the Ministry of Fishing, and the Ministry of Mining.21 By the end of
122 Chapter 10
1960, two-thirds of the economy was state controlled and the Central Planning
Board (JUCEPLAN) became the coordinating body for the whole economy.
It was backed up by the Ministry of Internal Trade, which was responsible for
wholesale and retail distribution, and the Ministry of Foreign Trade, which
controlled international commerce.
Carlos Rafael Rodríguez replaced Nuñez Jiménez in 1962 as INRA’s chief.
Rodríguez was one of the few who did have governmental experience and a
background in planning. A member of the PSP, the old Cuban Communist
Party, he had been a minister in Batista’s unity government during World War
II. Older than Raúl and Fidel, Rodríguez gained their trust in part because of
his strategic acumen, and in part because he had defied Moscow in supporting
the July 26th Movement.
In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union pursued a policy of promoting “peaceful
coexistence” with the United States. To Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier
and Communist Party general secretary, this meant that the Soviet Union would
not interfere with US interests in the Western Hemisphere and the United States
would not meddle in Eastern European affairs. In line with this policy, Moscow
ordered Communist parties in Latin America neither to support nor engage in
armed struggle and violent revolution. The order was especially relevant to
Cuba’s PSP, which watched as the Revolution unfolded under their noses.
Moscow did not vilify Rodríguez for his insubordination and relied on him
as a link to the revolutionary government. Still, Rodríguez played a quiet role
at first, mainly as an adviser to Raúl Castro. The revolutionaries sought to
obscure any ties to Communists, in part to avoid arousing US concerns that
Cuba would become a Soviet outpost. Rodríguez was well known as a theo-
retically sophisticated Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist.
However, by March 1960 former PSP officials were openly serving in gov-
ernment posts and Havana had established diplomatic relations with Moscow.
Castro began to include Rodríguez in the small group that determined govern-
ment policy, and so his appointment to head INRA was not a surprise. In 1976,
he was elevated to the post of second vice president after Raúl Castro.
New Political Organizations

Fidel and those close to him believed the Revolution could succeed only if
Cubans discarded a subservient mentality the Spanish had fostered during the
colonial period and the United States reinforced from 1898 to 1958.22 They
wanted Cubans to embrace the Revolution as their own achievement. In this
light, Castro’s initial weeklong trek—from Santiago to Havana starting on
January 2, 1959—had both cultural and political importance. “The salt of
the earth, the guajiros, were bringing political freedom to the metropolis,”
sociologist Valdés explains. “The guerrilleros repeated their message at each
stop: the revolutionary cause had triumphed; it was not the victory for a par-
ticular organization but a ‘people’s victory.’”23
The revolutionaries placed a great emphasis on full participation, because
they believed that Cubans would develop a selfless, communitarian con-
sciousness by actively behaving that way, not merely by reciting slogans.24
The institutions they created for engagement were mass organizations. These
were intended to link one or more significant aspects of a Cuban’s daily life
to the larger society. While the mass organizations were outside the govern-
ing political party, they functioned to engender loyalty and adhesion to the
system.25 They also served as a means to protect the Revolution, monitoring
potential threats festering below the surface.
By the mid-1960s there were five mass organizations: Confederation of
Cuban Workers (CTC in the Spanish acronym), National Association of
Small Farmers (ANAP), Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), Committees
for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), and the Federation of University
Students (FEU). While each organization featured voting for local represen-
tatives, they were not intended to be involved with elections for political
offices. Also, in contrast to the US model of interest-group democracy—in
which theoretically individuals express and promote their interests through
groups such as labor unions or trade associations that then pressure the gov-
ernment—the Cuban model assumed that seemingly disparate interests could
be made compatible once class differences were demolished. For example,
where the CTC once fought for workers’ interests vis-à-vis managers of
private companies, the revolutionary model assumed that the old CTC role
would no longer be necessary. The state had become the new management
and would supposedly serve, not exploit, workers. The new role for the CTC
would be to stimulate workers to be more productive, with the benefits of
increased output shared universally.26
CDRs were created in September 1960 as a response to increased attacks
by counterrevolutionaries. Organized on nearly every city block, these neigh-
borhood watch committees became an expanded form of the people’s militias
formed in 1959. Their symbol was a large eye and a stylized figure raising a
sword over the Cuban flag. In part, they also functioned as a means of social-
ization, engaging everyone in the process of providing security. By the end of
the 1960s—after the government had successfully routed organized counter-
revolutionary activity and the United States had ended most of its support for
anti-Castro terrorists—CDRs took on a different role as a civic organization
and an adjunct to social service agencies (see figures 10.5 and 10.6 for the
logo and propaganda of a CDR).
Polyclinics relied on CDRs to monitor and assist released patients with
their recovery. They helped to reintegrate ex-convicts into society, foster
school attendance by checking on absentees, and enlist volunteers for public
Figure 10.5. Contemporary CDR logo
Figure 10.6. Bulletin board outside a CDR in 1974. Photo by Philip Brenner.
events and campaigns.27 As a center of civic life, CDRs organized local sports
activities and block parties.
In December 1974, one of the authors, Philip Brenner, participated in vol-
untary work that a CDR had organized on a Sunday morning in Varadero, in
preparation for a New Year’s Eve fiesta. The “workers” consisted of Brenner,
who swept fallen leaves from the street, and two children, aged nine and
eleven, who climbed telephone poles in order to hang streamers. Most of the
neighbors were out on the street, mainly gossiping and occasionally offering
advice to the three workers. No one seemed to fear being labeled counter-
revolutionary for their lack of effort.
University students had long been organized through a national grassroots
organization, the FEU, which had produced several national leaders prior to
the Revolution and had wielded some political influence. Wary of its poten-
tial influence, the new government tried to shape the FEU’s agenda. While
it successfully co-opted the leadership, discontent bubbled up among the
members when the government imposed constraints on universities, in terms
of curriculum and students’ freedom of expression. Late in 1967, the govern-
ment forced the FEU to disband, claiming that it duplicated efforts because
the youth movement of the Cuban Communist Party, the Young Communists
(UJC), had the same members as the FEU. In reality, only the FEU leadership
overlapped with the UJC. When the FEU was reconstituted in 1971, its first
proclamation avowed loyalty to the Revolution.28
Communists (PSP)
Until mid-1961, there was no organization or party that coordinated the sev-
eral mass organizations and linked them to the purposes of the government.
At that point, Fidel created a new entity to serve this purpose, the Integrated
Revolutionary Organizations (ORI). It was made up of members from the July
26th Movement, the Revolutionary Directorate, and the PSP. Fidel reluctantly
brought PSP members into the process of rationalizing the Revolution, because
he believed there was a need to include a cadre of disciplined people who could
teach others about socialist principles. Aníbal Escalante, former editor of the
PSP newspaper, Hoy, and a slavish follower of Moscow’s dictums, became
the ORI’s organizational secretary. This proved to be a source of disruption,
as Escalante used his position to place former PSP buddies in key ORI posts,
providing himself with a base from which he could control the ORI.
Fidel cut Escalante’s plans short in March 1962, denouncing him for “sec-
tarianism,” charging that he was “blinded by personal ambition,” and exiling
him to Czechoslovakia.29 He also purged several other former PSP members
from the ORI leadership, and replaced Escalante with Emilio Aragonés, who
was national coordinator of the July 26th Movement. Notably, the move came
126 Chapter 10
at an especially sensitive moment in Cuban-Soviet relations, when Cuba was

looking for military support in what it anticipated would be a new US inva-
sion. In removing those who advocated that Cuba should adhere closely to
advice from Moscow, Castro made clear that even under these dire circum-
stances, he would not allow the Soviets to dictate Cuba’s internal affairs.
The Cuban leader contrasted his vision of the party he was proposing to
what were unmistakable references about the Soviet Communist Party. The
Cuban party, he declared, would have an integral link with the masses; it
would not stand above them, dominating, dispensing favors as a means of
control. The new ORI leaders reorganized the party at the end of 1962 and
gave the new entity the name that Fidel wanted: the United Party of the
Socialist Revolution (PURS). The PURS lasted until 1965, when the reestab-
lished Cuban Communist Party (PCC) replaced it.
Thus, a communist party did not exist in Cuba in 1959. Cuba did not even
renew diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union until the following year.
US hostility toward the revolutionary regime during its first year emanated
less from a concern about communism than about the loss of US domination
over Latin America and control over a country with which the United States
believed it had “ties of singular intimacy.”
NOTES
1. “Letter from the Secretary of State to the Vice President,” Foreign Relations of
the United States, 1958–1960, volume V, American Republics, Document 42, Wash-
ington, DC, March 6, 1958, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958
-60v05/d42.
2. Milton S. Eisenhower, “United States–Latin American Relations, 1953–1958:
Report to the President,” December 27, 1958; reprinted in Department of State Bul-
letin 40, no. 1021 (January 19, 1959): 90.
3. Claes Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba: The Challenge of Economic Growth
with Equity (Boulder, CO : Westview, 1984), 5.
4. Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba, 12–13.
5. Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba, 43.
6. John F. Kennedy, “Address on the First Anniversary of the Alliance for Prog-
ress,” March 13, 1962; American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa
Barbara, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9100.
7. The limit was 30 caballerías, or 995 acres. Farms used for range land, or that
were fifty percent more productive than the national average, could be as large as 100
caballerías, or 3,316 acres.
9. Nuñez Jiménez, En Marcha Con Fidel—1959, 148. Also see Minor Sinclair and
Martha Thompson, Cuba, Going Against the Grain: Agricultural Crisis and Trans-
formation (Boston: Oxfam, 2001), 13.
10. Susan Eva Eckstein, Back from the Future: Cuba Under Castro, second edition
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 18.
11. Silvia Pedraza, Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 122, 268.
12. Abel Prieto, “Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign,” Journal of Reading 25, no.
3 (December 1981): 216. Also see Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in
Cuba, chapter 3.
13. Jonathan Kozol, Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban
Schools (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), 5.
14. Catherine Murphy’s film about the literacy campaign, Maestra, captures the
feelings that four brigadistas express fifty years later. Available at http://www.mae
strathefilm.org.
15. Prieto, “Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign,” 218.
16. Julie M. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and
Abroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Conner Gorry and C. Wil-
liam Keck, “The Cuban Health System: In Search of Quality, Efficiency, and Sustain-
ability,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed.
Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
17. Marguerite Rose Jiménez, “Polio and the Politics of Policy Diffusion in Latin
America,” PhD diss. (American University, Washington, DC, 2013), 424.
18. Felipe Eduardo Sixto, “An Evaluation of Four Decades of Cuban Healthcare,”
in Cuba in Transition, vol. 12 (McLean, VA: Association for the Study of the Cuban
Economy, 2002), 326.
19. Media Benjamin, Joseph Collins, and Michael Scott, No Free Lunch: Food
and Revolution in Cuba Today (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development
Policy, 1984), chapter 3.
20. Domínguez, Cuba, 233–35.
21. Edward Boorstein, The Economic Transformation of Cuba (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1968), chapter 3.
22. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
23. Valdés, “The Revolutionary and Political Content of Fidel Castro’s Charis-
matic Authority,” 33.
25. William LeoGrande, “Mass Political Participation,” in The Cuba Reader: The
Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988).
26. Maurice Zeitlin, Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class (New
York: Harper & Row, 1970).
27. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, chapter 4 (especially
80–96).
28. Domínguez, Cuba, 279–80.
29. “Fidel Castro Denounces Sectarianism” (Speech of March 26, 1962), Ministry
of Foreign Relations, Republic of Cuba, Political Documents: 2, 12, 17, 23–25; avail-
able at http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/compoundobject/collection/radical/id/40999/
show/40921.
Chapter 11
Bay of Pigs/Playa Girón1
[José Ramón] Suco, the head of the squad from Battalion 339 that had
been guarding the radio at Larga Beach, recalled: “One of the literacy
teachers had his head on my shoulder, when a mercenary [Bay of Pigs
invader] walked up to him and asked, ‘What kind of uniform is that?’ ‘A
literacy teacher’s uniform.’ ‘Are you a Communist?’ ‘I support Fidel,’ the
boy, who wasn’t even fifteen yet, answered. And the mercenary replied,
‘You know that everyone who supports Fidel is a Communist.’ ‘Well, then,
I’m a Communist.’
“If Castro’s planes had been destroyed, if the U.S. Government hadn’t left
the exiles to their fate, if they had had greater participation in the planning,
if the attack had been made at Trinidad, if the underground had been alerted,
if a diversionary landing had been made at Baracoa, if air cover had been
provided, if the Brigade had been better equipped, if there had been direct in-
tervention. . . . The exiles thought that, if any of those things had happened,
it would have ensured their success. They refused to accept the real reason
for their defeat . . . the Cuban people were at the peak of their patriotism and
revolutionary fervor, and their support for the Revolution.”
—Juan Carlos Rodríguez2
CUBA BECOMES A THREAT
US Response to Revolution
At first, Washington did not know what to make of the Cuban Revolution. US
officials were well aware of Batista’s atrocities, and formally had suspended
new military aid to Cuba in 1958. But the Eisenhower administration did not
128
Bay of Pigs/Playa Girón 129
want to signal its support for armed conflict against established governments,
and so at first it took a “wait and see” approach.
On January 7, 1959, the United States gave diplomatic recognition to the
new government. One week later, the State Department replaced the US am-
bassador, Earl E. T. Smith. He had been a Batista booster and large benefactor
of the Republican Party, which landed him the appointment to what seemed at
the time like a posh, nonproblematic post. The new envoy, Philip Bonsal, was
a Spanish-speaking career diplomat known for his sympathy to reformers in
Colombia and Bolivia. Concerned about the US reputation for intervention in
Latin America, he hoped to find a way that the United States could live with
the new regime.3
Beneath this seemingly benign approach, though, lingered an attitude of
superiority that we saw in chapters 4 and 5 when the United States occupied
Cuba after the Cuban War of Independence. Historian Louis Pérez observes
that US officials imagined Cubans as if they were young children: immature,
ignorant, and untutored in the ways of civilized people. And as a parent, the
United States had “the duty to protect and nurture Cuba,” which justified US
domination of Cuba as a selfless fulfillment of parental duty.4
Embedded in the parent-child metaphor, linguist George Lakoff explains,
is the expectation that the parent has the responsibility to teach the child right
from wrong. And so when children are disobedient, they must be punished in
order to instill them with discipline.5 To spare the rod was to spoil the child.
In turn, an offspring had the responsibility to be appropriately grateful and
deferential to the parent.
But to the victorious leaders of the 1959 Revolution, playing their “proper”
role as children would have been snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
They refused to be either compliant or appreciative. In response, US officials,
editorial writers, and cartoonists soon began to depict the new Cuban govern-
ment, and Fidel Castro, as a screaming, ranting, temperamental child—the
kind of nuisance President Theodore Roosevelt had castigated in 1906, when
he called the country “that infernal little Cuban republic.”6
From Irritant to Menace

During the first months after the victory over Batista, the US concern over
Cuba was not about the Soviet Union, with which Cuba had neither diplo-
matic nor trade relations. Officials worried about Fidel Castro’s charisma and
his penchant to have Cuba chart an independent course. This concern was
evident in a confidential memo Vice President Richard Nixon wrote after
meeting with Fidel in April 1959. The Cuban leader, Nixon judged,
130 Chapter 11
has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we
may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and
very possibly in Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere. He is
either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline—my
guess is the former. . . . But because he has the power to lead to which I have
referred we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.7
Nixon met Fidel while the new prime minister was in the United States on
a public relations gambit to improve his image prior to rolling out the Agrar-
ian Reform Law. Staying at a Harlem hotel, he toured the city, spoke to thirty
thousand people in Central Park, visited Yankee Stadium, and appeared on
Meet the Press. When Castro arrived in Washington, President Eisenhower
pointedly departed for a golfing date in Georgia, leaving Nixon to meet with
the bearded revolutionary. The two engaged in a wide-ranging conversation
for several hours, with Fidel graciously speaking in broken English.
The Cuban leader not only rejected US “orientation.” He did not request
any US foreign assistance, which troubled US officials, because they hoped
that US aid would be a mechanism for binding Cuba to the United States. In
addition, there was inconclusive evidence that Cuba was sending missions to
support insurgent activity against dictatorships in the Dominican Republic,
Panama, and Nicaragua.8 These alleged expeditions implicitly challenged US
dominance in the region and the US conception of itself as protector of the
hemisphere, an idea nurtured since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
By October 1959, the US image of Cuba as a wayward child seemed too
benign. The revolutionary government had transformed Cuba into a juvenile
delinquent, a menace more than an irritant. Incapable of being disciplined,
and unwilling to acknowledge that it owed gratitude to the United States
for the “blessings of liberty” bestowed on the island since 1898, Cuba had
betrayed its parent’s heritage and upbringing. Wayne S. Smith was a junior
foreign service officer in the embassy at the time, and later became chief US
diplomat in Cuba from 1979 to 1982. He recalls that “by October 1959 most
of us in Havana” had decided Castro was turning toward the Soviet Union.9
In an October 1959 policy paper later endorsed by the secretary of state, As-
sistant Secretary R. Roy Rubottom Jr. concluded:
That the policies and programs of the Castro Government which are inconsis-
tent with the minimal requirements of good Cuban-US relations and with US
objectives for Cuba and Latin America will not be satisfactorily altered except
as a result of Cuban opposition to Castro’s present course and/or a change in
the Cuban regime.10
Secretary of State Christian Herter summarized for President Eisenhower

why Cuba’s resistance to US discipline posed a threat to the United States.
In a November 1959 memo, he observed that Castro “has veered towards
a ‘neutralist’ anti-American foreign policy for Cuba which, if emulated by

other Latin American countries, would have serious adverse effects on Free
World support of our leadership.”11 By the end of November 1959 even
Ambassador Bonsal had become critical of Cuba’s “independent position in
world affairs.”12 Before the new year began, the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) was developing plans to overthrow the Cuban government.13
Enter the Soviet Union

The Soviets knew little about Fidel Castro and the July 26th Movement,
and at first they tended to operate from the assumption that Cuba was still
within the US sphere of interest. They also were not eager to support rebels
who neither would take orders from Moscow nor were likely to survive US
antagonism. Moscow waited a year before proposing that a Soviet trade del-
egation go to Havana.
The group that came in February 1960 was a prominent one, headed by
First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan. Shortly afterward, the two countries
reestablished diplomatic relations, which Batista had broken in 1952 after he
seized power. Mikoyan concluded the trade mission by announcing $100 mil-
lion of commercial credit for the Cuban government, including oil shipments,
and pledging to buy five million tons of Cuban sugar annually for five years.
It was a signal of a major change after decades of Cuban economic depen-
dence on US trade, and it spurred President Eisenhower to approve plans for
a covert operation on March 17, 1960, to overthrow the Cuban government—
plans that became the Bay of Pigs invasion.14
The operation was to be based on the CIA’s 1954 intervention in Guate-
mala, when the agency helped to overthrow the democratically elected gov-
ernment headed by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Its plan called for the creation of
opposition and propaganda units among exiles in Miami, an acceleration of
intelligence operations on the island, and support for counterrevolutionaries,
along with the training of five hundred exiles who would invade the island.
Their arrival was supposed to spark an island-wide revolt that would oust the
revolutionary government. The CIA turned to the now friendly Guatemala
dictatorship to provide facilities for preparing the invaders.
Tensions Increase
In June 1960, President Eisenhower ordered Esso and Texaco not to refine
Soviet petroleum at the companies’ Cuban facilities. In a speech vehemently
denouncing imperialism, Prime Minister Castro responded by announcing the
nationalization of the refineries. One month later, the United States reduced
Cuba’s sugar quota to zero, effectively imposing a ban on Cuban sugar.
132 Chapter 11
Given the centrality of sugar to the Cuban economy, the zero-quota decision
is often cited as the start of the US economic embargo. But Eisenhower’s
advisers viewed the action as nothing more than “a good solid slap,” that is, a
restrained response to Cuba’s expropriation of the refineries, short of deadly
options that the United States might have chosen.15
The United States followed up in August by pressuring the Organization of
American States (OAS) to condemn Cuba for permitting Soviet “extra-con-
tinental intervention” in the hemisphere that “endangers American solidarity
and security.”16 Castro reacted to the OAS condemnation with the “First
Declaration of Havana” on September 2, 1960. Throwing down a gauntlet to
the United States, he proclaimed Cuba would be committed to ending what
Herter had called US “leadership” and Castro characterized as “domination”:
“[T]he People of Cuba strongly condemn US imperialism for its gross and
criminal domination . . . of all the peoples of Latin America . . . affirm their
faith that Latin America, united and victorious will soon be free of the bonds
that now make its economies rich spoils for US imperialism.”17
From the US perspective, the speech was an aggressive assault. And then
Cuba added fuel to the simmering fire. Late in 1960, it received a few ship-
ments of antiquated arms from Soviet bloc countries, which confirmed US
government fears that Cuba might become a beachhead for Soviet influence
in the Western Hemisphere.18
Charges that Castro had betrayed the Cuban revolution swirled around
Washington, and the US press turned sharply against the revolutionaries.
Accordingly, plans to overthrow the Cuban government took on the air of a
noble enterprise. Dazzled by the mistaken assumption that Cubans yearned
for the prerevolutionary relationship, US officials convinced themselves that
the Cuban people would rise up spontaneously against the Cuban government
and invite the United States to restore order in the country.19 On January 3,
1961, in the final days of his administration, President Eisenhower contrib-
uted to the seemingly unstoppable momentum for an invasion. Citing “ha-
rassments” by the Cuban government—Cuba had demanded two days earlier
that the US embassy reduce its staff to eleven people—the US president broke
diplomatic relations with Cuba.20
THE PLAN CHANGES
As Secret as Christmas Day

Richard Bissell was an ambitious CIA deputy director for plans who had
voted for John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the November 1960 election. An Ivy
Leaguer, he felt a rapport with the president-elect and hoped that Kennedy
would choose him to succeed Allen Dulles as CIA director. But when he
briefed Kennedy about the covert operation ten days after the presidential
election, Bissell neglected to inform the president-elect that the plan had
changed. The CIA had decided that the initial plan—to slowly infiltrate five
hundred paramilitaries into Cuba to reinforce counterrevolutionaries already
in place—was no longer feasible.
The new plan called for a force three times as large that would seize and
hold a piece of territory, declaring itself to be the new legitimate govern-
ment of Cuba. The invasion was expected to “precipitate a general uprising
throughout Cuba and cause the revolt of large segments of the Cuban Army
and Militia,” as Jack Hawkins, the US field commander for the Bay of Pigs
operation, wrote in a January 1961 memo.21
Bissell also neglected to inform Kennedy about two other essential ele-
ments of the operation: an ongoing CIA program to assassinate the Cuban
leadership and his expectation that the president ultimately would need to
use US military forces to support the invaders. US attempts to assassinate
Fidel Castro have been acknowledged officially since the 1975 US Senate
hearings chaired by Frank Church (D-ID). But only in the mid-1990s did it
become certain that murdering the Cuban leadership was an essential com-
ponent of the Bay of Pigs attack.
As historian Michael Warner wrote in a now declassified study, Dulles and
Bissell were unconcerned about the logistical shortcomings of the exiles’ at-
tack because they believed “Castro would either be assassinated or President
Kennedy would send in the Marines to rescue the Brigade.”22 Jacob Esterline,
the operational director for the invasion in the CIA’s Directorate for Plans,
quickly understood the implication of the assassination strategy when he saw
documents about it for the first time at a 1996 conference. As tears welled in
his eyes, he said, “I’ll tell you what really bothers me about this. This stupid
cockamamie idea may well have compromised serious support and backing of
the brigade operation that was the main event, or should have been. . . . Maybe
[Bissell] didn’t even care much about whether my people made it or not.”23
While the Soviet bloc had not yet provided Cuba with significant military
equipment, Cuba compensated for its lack of military strength with a capable
intelligence operation. It infiltrated several agents into the Guatemala training
camps, which turned out to be relatively easy. When the CIA increased the
number of the invaders from five hundred to fifteen hundred, it desperately
sought recruits with advertisements in Miami. Journalist Peter Wyden quoted
one disgruntled CIA official saying that the covert operation had become “as
secret as Christmas Day.”24 Cuban leaders were aware, therefore, that the
United States was preparing for an exile invasion. But they did not know
precisely when and where the assault would occur.
134 Chapter 11
Cuban military planners evaluated several likely invasion sites. One obvi-
ous entry point was the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay. The United
States could secretly bring exiles to the base and launch the attack from there.
But the site was so obvious that the Cubans came to discount its importance.
However, they did worry that an exile force might masquerade as regular
Cuban soldiers, attack the US base, and thus create a pretext for a US inva-
sion. The Guantánamo Bay naval station was in Oriente Province, which had
historical significance as the location where earlier Cuban revolts had started.
The second possibility was given so much credence that Raúl Castro took
personal command of Cuban defense forces in Oriente.
Meanwhile, Cuban militia members were deployed in small numbers
along the northern and southern coasts as lookouts. Internal security was
tightened—any report of suspicious activity led to arrests, which did result in
abuses. In April 1961 alone, thousands were imprisoned.
Kennedy Wants a “Quiet” Landing

Prior to his inauguration, the newly elected president raised few objections
about the planned invasion. But once in office, he began to worry that an in-
cursion could worsen the already negative US image in Latin America. This
concern led him to tell the CIA on March 11 to move the planned landing site
from the city of Trinidad—on Cuba’s southern coast—to a place that would
“provide for a ‘quiet’ landing,” according to the CIA’s inspector general’s
postmortem report. It added that the president wanted to avoid “the appear-
ance of a World War II type of amphibious assault” that would expose the
hand of the United States.25
The CIA came back four days later with a new location, the Bay of Pigs,
which had an existing airfield capable of handling “tactical air operations”
and where there could be “An Unspectacular Landing.”26 In fact, the location
was less than ideal. Only three roads led to the beaches, easily enabling the
Cuban military to establish roadblocks. Had the exiles landed at Trinidad,
they would have been able to flee to the adjacent Escambray Mountains
where counterrevolutionaries were based. The Bay of Pigs is seventy miles
west of the Escambray. Survivors would have had to traverse the crocodile-
infested Zapata swamp to reach the mountains.
Despite its logistical shortcomings, subordinates sensed that President Ken-
nedy was reluctant to cancel the operation. No one wanted to be marked as a
naysayer early in an administration that was trying to create a can-do image.
In part, the young president himself had undermined the possibility of calling
off the invasion, by attacking Nixon during the election campaign for failing
to come to the aid of counterrevolutionaries, whom he called “fighters for
freedom.”27 Now that he was in a position to help them, critics were certain to
harp on his apparent hypocrisy if he had not acted. And the window for action
was closing quickly. On February 17, the CIA had concluded that “the Castro
regime is steadily consolidating its control over Cuba—there was no signifi-
cant likelihood that the Castro regime will fall of its own weight.”28
TWO PERSPECTIVES ON THE DEFEAT OF BRIGADE 2506
Each member of the invading party received a number, starting at 2,501. The
numbering was intended to make the Cubans think the group was larger than
the 1,500 actually involved. In the aftermath, the survivors named themselves
Brigade 2506, after the number of the first invader who was killed.
At 1:15 a.m. on April 17, 1961, the first landing party arrived at Playa
Girón, the beach at the mouth of the eighteen-mile-long Bay of Pigs, on the
southern coast of Cuba. Three days later, 114 members of Brigade 2506 lay
dead, 1,189 had been captured, and the fighting was over. The narrative of
the invasion has been told many times, most often from the US perspective,
which contrasts with the Cuban view.
US Perspective: “A Perfect Failure” or Betrayal

There are two popular US perspectives. The most common focuses on the
constellation of logistical errors that led to the outcome, which journalist
Theodore Draper dubbed as “a perfect failure.”29 The other US narrative,
often heard from Brigade 2506 survivors, emphasizes President Kennedy’s
unwillingness to provide more military support, which they have character-
ized as a betrayal.30
A map of the Bay of Pigs area (see map 11.1 on next page) indicates the
swamps to the east and northeast of the landing site, which made escape to
the Escambray Mountains nearly impossible. Cubans name the invasion after
one of the beaches, Playa Girón, around which significant fighting occurred.
There was also a landing at Playa Larga, at the northern end of the bay.
Two days before the invasion, the CIA attempted to destroy the small Cu-
ban air force and make airfields inoperable. Eight crews made up of Alabama
National Guard members and Cuban exiles flew B-26 bombers camouflaged
to look as if they were Cuban military planes. In anticipation of the attack,
Fidel had ordered mock planes made of balsa wood to be placed outside
hangars and the actual planes to be hidden. The air raid left Cuba with almost
its entire air force undamaged—two B-26 bombers, three British World War
II Sea Fury fighter planes, and three T-33 jet trainers. All of the airstrips
136 Chapter 11
Map 11.1. Bay of Pigs Area. Map by Peter WD.
remained operable. The CIA then requested authorization for a second bomb-
ing run. Kennedy refused, still seeking to keep the US role hidden.
Thus, one explanation for the Bay of Pigs failure was that the tiny and bat-
tered Cuban air force was able to sink the invaders’ resupply ship, dooming
the operation, because Kennedy refused to order an air strike on the morn-
ing of the invasion. But the report by the CIA inspector general (IG) on the
operation concluded that additional air strikes would have made little differ-
ence because of many other organizational problems.31 For example, a 160-
man diversionary unit, which was supposed to land about thirty miles east
of Guantánamo on April 15, decided to avoid capture and stayed safely on
its boat. The Taylor Committee—created by President Kennedy and headed
by General Maxwell D. Taylor—judged that “This failure may have had a
considerable affect [sic] on the main landing as the diversion was intended to
draw Castro’s forces to the east and confuse his command.”32
The CIA training program had problems from the outset. Most of the
project officers did not speak Spanish. They prepared the brigadistas mainly
for an assault, not for guerrilla warfare, and for a daylight invasion, although
the plan called for night landings. Food in the Guatemala camp was terrible
and the living conditions were harsh. Morale was so low that some of early
recruits abandoned the operation.
This problem was not only a logistical issue. It reflected, as the IG starkly
concluded, the “contempt” CIA officials felt toward the Cubans and the
“high-handed attitude” with which they were treated.33 Such contempt was
the ultimate betrayal of Brigade 2506. The CIA did not believe the Cuban
exiles could run their own program. Project officers described the brigadistas
as “yellow-bellied,” and the Cuban Revolutionary Council—the supposedly
future political leaders of Cuba whom the CIA had hand-picked—as “idiots,”
according to the IG.34
Just before the invasion began, the Cuban Revolutionary Council members
were locked in a “safe house” at Opa Locka airfield outside Miami, despite
their protestations, while the CIA wrote and issued public statements in the
name of the brigade’s political leaders. Kennedy ordered Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., and Adolf A. Berle, a longtime Latin American adviser to Democratic
presidents, to rush to the base to calm down the Cubans. One of them report-
edly was threatening to commit suicide.35
Cuban Perspective: “First Defeat of Imperialism in the Americas”

While the April 15 bombardment of airfields did little damage to Cuba’s
so-called air force, it did kill a number of workers. The next day, thousands
of Cubans attended a rally outside the Colón Cemetery in Havana, where
Castro and other officials condemned the attacks and mourned the dead. In
his speech, the Cuban leader for the first time described the “character” of the
Cuban Revolution as socialist.
Several lightly armed members of Cuba’s People’s Militia detected the
landing of the first brigade on April 17 within fifteen minutes of its arrival
and sent a radio warning. A similar signal came soon after from a militia unit
at Playa Larga, the beach at the head of the bay, eighteen miles away. A Cu-
ban army battalion stationed at a sugar mill about 45 miles from the Bay of
Pigs mobilized before dawn and engaged the attackers, but lacking armored
vehicles, it quickly retreated.
Fidel Castro quickly took charge, shouting orders into telephones in a
frenzy, mobilizing the air force and battalions throughout the country. José
Ramón Fernández, a professional military officer who was director of Cuba’s
military schools that were training new cadets for the armed forces, became
commander of the main unit at the Bay of Pigs. At about 2:00 a.m. on April
17, Castro woke him with a call, ordering to him to go to the battle front. A
few minutes later Castro called again, demanding to know what Fernández
was doing. He was still getting dressed. Ten minutes passed and Castro called
again: “Why are you still there?”36
Cuban air force planes arrived at daybreak and began bombing. Fidel had
ordered that their priority should be the supply ships. They hit two, destroying
one and damaging another. By midday, the Cuban leader was there himself,
fighting alongside the militia and regular soldiers. In figure 11.1, we see a photo
138 Chapter 11
Figure 11.1. Fidel Castro (in glasses) during the battle at the Bay of Pigs. Photo cour-
tesy of Granma.
of Castro on this historic day. When the 72-hour conflict ended, eighty-seven
Cuban defenders had been killed, and more than two hundred were wounded.
Fidel was triumphant. He declared the victory as “the First Defeat of Im-
perialism in the Americas.” News of the outcome resounded throughout the
third world, inflating further the symbol of the Cuban David challenging the
US Goliath. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reevaluated his earlier judg-
ment, decided that the Cuban revolution had a good chance to survive, and
authorized increased shipments of military equipment and subsidized trade
with Cuba.37 (However, by December 1961 the Soviets had not shipped any
of the promised MIG-15 fighters, MI-4 helicopters, torpedo boats, advanced
communication equipment, or military specialists.)
THE FATAL FLAW
The story of the Bay of Pigs invasion commonly told in the United States
tends to echo the official histories. By emphasizing logistical failures, it re-
produces the lack of respect for Cubans that the CIA showed for the Cuban
exiles. Indeed, the low regard most US officials showed for all of the Cubans
involved was the fatal flaw of the mission.
US planners seemed unable to appreciate the genuine, widespread support

the Cuban Revolution had earned in its first two years. Ordinary Cubans who
lived in the Bay of Pigs vicinity fought tenaciously against the invaders be-
cause they had something to protect. Consider that “a contingent of volunteer
teachers was assigned to work throughout the swamp” in January 1961, and
for the first time “thousands of children who lived on the Zapata Peninsula
began to go to elementary school.”38 Similarly, the area had been without a
hospital until the government built one in 1959, and farmers there had felt
isolated because there were no roads until 1960.
The US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion was bound to fail because US of-
ficials denied that Cubans could be agents of their own history. The flawed
assumption that the invasion would spark a mass insurrection—not its logis-
tics—was the Achilles’ heel of the project. It was fueled by a political mis-
judgment about what a large majority of Cubans wanted. They wanted neither
the form of democracy the United States had supported in Cuba from 1940
to 1952—characterized by corruption and politicians who did the bidding
of the US government and corporations—nor the brutal Batista dictatorship,
which the United States tolerated and which gave a free reign to organized
crime. Cubans wanted independence and sovereignty. The 1959 Cuban revo-
lution was a nationalist uprising. Most Cubans believed that the many errors
committed by the revolutionary government were made in good faith, for the
benefit of ordinary Cubans. They also were beginning to believe that Cubans
themselves could solve their problems.
NOTES
1. Several excellent studies have been published about the planning for and execu-
tion of the US invasion at Playa Girón, as Cubans refer to the events, or the Bay of
Pigs, as the invasion generally is called in the United States. These include James G.
Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reex-
amined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified:
The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press, 1998); Jim
Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion
of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011); Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Bay
of Pigs and the CIA, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999). Unless
otherwise noted, the narrative of this chapter is based on these secondary sources. A
large number of primary documents are available from the National Security Archive,
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu. In particular, see document sets “The Cuban Missile Cri-
sis, 1962,” “The Cuban Missile Crisis: 50th Anniversary Update,” and “The Cuban
Missile Crisis Revisited: An International Collection, From Bay of Pigs to Nuclear
Brink.” Also see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, volume X, Cuba,
140 Chapter 11
January 1961–September 1962, ed. Louis J. Smith (Washington, DC: Government

Printing Office, 1997), cited as FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X; Foreign Relations of
the United States, 1961–1963, volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, eds.
Edward C. Keefer, Charles S. Sampson, and Louis J. Smith (Washington, DC: Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1996), cited as FRUS, 1961–1963, volume XI.
2. Rodríguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, 142, 176.
3. Wayne S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account
of US-Cuban Relations since 1957 (New York: Norton, 1987), 47. Also see Philip
W. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1971), 25–28, 39–42.
4. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2008), 113.
5. George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and
Vision (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 57–58.
7. Richard M. Nixon, “Rough draft of summary of conversation between the
vice-president and Fidel Castro,” April 25, 1959, reprinted in Jeffrey J. Safford,
“The Nixon-Castro Meeting of 19 April 1959,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 4 (Fall
1980): 431.
8. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 325, June 25, 1959. Cuba has
acknowledged its active support only for a raid against the Dominican Republic’s
Rafael Trujillo.
9. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 52.
10. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 376, October 23, 1959.
11. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 387, November 5, 1959.
12. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, 85.
13. Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of
the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 242, 258.
14. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 486, March 17, 1960.
15. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, 109.
16. “Text of O.A.S. Declaration of San Jose,” New York Times, August 29, 1960, 3.
17. “First Declaration of Havana,” September 2, 1960, in Cuban Revolution
Reader: A Documentary History of 40 Key Moments of the Cuban Revolution, ed.
Julio García Luis (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2001), 45–51.
18. Sergio del Valle Jiménez, ed., Peligros y Principios: La Crisis de Octubre
desde Cuba (Havana: Editora Verde Olivo, 1992), 48.
19. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban
Operation,” October 1961, p. 48, available at the National Security Archive, Wash-
ington, DC, Accession No. CU00223; reprinted in Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs
Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press,
1998), 48.
20. E. W. Kenworthy, “Regime Is Scored; People Suffer Under ‘Yoke of Dictator,’
President Says,” New York Times, January 4, 1961, 1.
21. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 9, January 4, 1961.
22. Michael Warner, “Lessons Unlearned: The CIA’s Internal Probe of the Bay
of Pigs Affair,” Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1998/99, https://www.cia.gov/library/
center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter98_99/
art08.html.
23. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 85.
24. Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1979), 119.
25. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Taylor Commission Report on Cuban Op-
erations,” Memorandum No. 1, June 13, 1961, 10; available at the National Security
Archive, Washington, DC, Accession No. CU00181 [hereafter cited as Taylor Com-
mission, Memorandum No. 1].
26. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 61, March 15, 1961.
27. “Text of Statement by Kennedy on Dealing with Castro Regime,” New York
Times, October 21, 1960, 18.
28. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 46, February 17, 1961.
29. Theodore Draper, Castro’s Revolution: Myths and Realities (New York: Prae-
ger, 1962), 59.
30. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, prologue and chapter 1; Haynes
Johnson with Manuel Artime, The Bay of Pigs: The Leaders’ Story of Brigade 2506
(New York: Norton, 1964).
31. Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, 41.
32. Taylor Commission, Memorandum No. 1, 14–15.
35. Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster, 286.
36. Fidel Castro and José Ramón Fernández, Playa Girón (New York: Pathfinder
Press, 2001), 107.
37. Carlos Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev, Kennedy and
the Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), 18; Aleksandr
Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Ken-
nedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 139–40, 146.
38. Rodríguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, 118–121.
Chapter 12
The Missile Crisis
We’re already a modern country, we have twentieth-century weapons,

atomic bombs, we’re no longer an insignificant colony, we’ve already rushed
into history, we have the same weapons that the Russians and the Americans
rattle at each other. Our power of destruction makes us an equal for a mo-
ment to the two great world powers. Still, I’m sure they’ll never accept us
on equal terms, they’ll take our weapons away, ignore us, crush this island.
—Narrator of Inconsolable Memories1
Writing to Fidel Castro in 1965, Che Guevara recalled the October 1962 mis-
sile crisis in the following way: “I have lived magnificent days and I felt at
your side the pride of belonging to our people in the luminous and sad days
of the Caribbean crisis.”2
Luminous and sad? You would be hard pressed to find any American or
Russian who recalled those days as luminous and sad. “Harrowing,” “ex-
hausting,” “stressful,” “frightening,” and “horrifying.” These were the words
used by those who experienced the crisis. Did Guevara and his Cuban com-
rades experience the same crisis as the Americans and Soviets?
In fact, the significance of the 1962 trilateral confrontation over ballistic
missiles in Cuba was different for Cubans than for others. The crisis had a
lasting impact on Cuba’s foreign relations, though the Cuban perspective
about the crisis is not widely known in the United States.
While the 1962 missile crisis brought the world closer to a nuclear war than
any other crisis, it also seemed to end well. The United States and the Soviet
Union did not go to war; the Soviets removed the missiles; the United States
promised not to invade Cuba. Only one US soldier died in combat, Major
Rudolph Anderson, who was piloting the U-2 surveillance plane the Soviets
downed with a surface-to-air missile (SAM) on October 27.
142
The Missile Crisis 143
Most Americans understand the Cuban Missile Crisis as teachers and

commentators repeatedly have summarized it: The Soviet Union placed bal-
listic missiles in Cuba to threaten the United States. These missiles could
hit major US cities and ports in less than ten minutes. The crisis lasted for
thirteen days, from October 16, when President Kennedy learned about the
missiles, until October 28, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed
to remove the missiles in exchange for a US promise not to invade Cuba. The
outcome was a great success for the United States, and perhaps Kennedy’s
“finest hour.” In early 2001, one of the authors took his fourteen-year-old
Map 12.1. Map used by CIA briefers for President John F. Kennedy on October
16, 1962, indicates the estimated range of the Soviet ballistic missiles. Central
Intelligence Agency, “Probable Soviet MRBM Sites in Cuba,” October 16, 1962.
144 Chapter 12
daughter to see Thirteen Days, a film that tells the missile crisis story from
the traditional US perspective. As they exited the theater, he asked her why
the Soviets had placed the missiles in Cuba. On the basis of the film, she
said, “Because they were bad people.”
A Cuban’s view of the crisis provides a stark contrast to an American one.
Cubans even give it a different name, the “October Crisis.” The name embod-
ies several elements, according to Cuban political scientist Carlos Alzugaray
Treto. Cubans, he explained, at first used “Caribbean Crisis”—the Soviet
name for the confrontation—and “October Crisis” interchangeably. But over
time, he said, they “began to settle for “crisis de octubre,” because “there
were so many crises with the US that what defined each crisis was the month
in which it happened and not the place.”3 A second explanation for the Cuban
appellation is that Cubans have used it to indicate that their understanding
of the crisis differs from the Soviet interpretation. The name thus highlights
Cuba’s ongoing tension with the United States, which Cubans argued led to
the crisis over the missiles, and Cuba’s claim of betrayal by the Soviet Union.
From Cuba’s perspective, Soviet and US interests defined the terms by which
they avoided a nuclear war. The two superpowers neither addressed nor re-
solved the underlying causes of the crisis, the US war against Cuba.4
THREE PERSPECTIVES
“Eyeball to Eyeball”: The Traditional US Narrative

Harvard political scientist Graham Allison articulated a view in 1971 that
summarizes nearly all early analyses of the crisis: “For thirteen days in Octo-
ber 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood ‘eyeball to eyeball,’
each with the power of mutual annihilation in hand. . . . During the crisis, the
United States was firm but forbearing. The Soviet Union looked hard, blinked
twice, and then withdrew.”5 From this perspective, the crisis involved only
the two superpowers and lasted less than two weeks.
In fact, prior to October 16, 1962, US officials had become concerned
about the increasing Soviet military buildup in Cuba. The Central Intelligence
Agency judged in late August that the Soviets were delivering large quantities
of defensive equipment to Cuba, but not ballistic missiles. Still, the president
directed the Defense Department to examine ways of removing the Soviet
military presence in Cuba.6
Meanwhile, several US senators repeatedly charged that the Soviet deliv-
eries included offensive weapons, perhaps even ballistic missiles. Kennedy
responded to the charges on September 4 by asserting there was no evidence
of “ground-to-ground” missiles in Cuba. He then warned, “Were it otherwise
the gravest issues would arise.” Congress followed up with a joint resolution
on October 3, approving the use of force against Cuba. The same day—nearly
two weeks before the United States discovered the ballistic missiles—the
commander in chief of Atlantic forces ordered that US warships be in place
by October 20 in preparation for a blockade of Cuba.7
By establishing a limit of zero ballistic missiles in Cuba, Kennedy unwit-
tingly created the circumstances in which he ultimately found himself engulfed.
Once he learned about the missiles, he believed he could accept nothing less
than their complete removal. As a result of the kind of Maginot Line that Ken-
nedy drew in early September, he and his advisers—a group he dubbed the
“Executive Committee of the National Security Council” or “ExComm”—then
perceived Khrushchev’s action as a provocative test of US determination to
resist Soviet pressure. Once they framed the Soviet action this way, it became a
major national security threat because the credibility of US resolve was central
to the strategy of deterrence. The ExComm erroneously surmised that Khru
shchev believed Kennedy was timid and unsure of himself.8 They concluded
that Kennedy’s seeming weakness had led Khrushchev to take the risk of send-
ing missiles to Cuba, in order to give himself a “bargaining chip,” something he
could later give up in negotiations with the United States over Berlin.9
Caribbean Crisis: The Soviet Perspective

Like US officials, the Soviets viewed the crisis principally as a clash between
the two superpowers. But they preferred to call it the “Caribbean Crisis.”
While Cuba’s security figured into their reasons for bringing the missiles
there, the actual confrontation for them occurred on the high seas, in the Ca-
ribbean.10 But unlike the US narrative, the Soviet story of the missile crisis
begins well before October 1962.
In his memoirs, Khrushchev suggests it dated from April 1961, when the
United States failed to overthrow the Cuban government with the Bay of Pigs
invasion. This is consistent with his claim that the primary reason for placing
missiles in Cuba was to protect the revolutionary government from a US in-
vasion.11 Khrushchev’s second motivation for deploying missiles to Cuba was
to redress the significant imbalance in nuclear forces that favored the United
States.12 In 1962, the United States had 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads; the
Soviet Union had 300. It may have had as few as ten intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs); the United States had more than 150 ICBMs, in addition
to intermediate-range missiles in Europe that could reach the Soviet Union. In
effect, the Soviets believed they could not credibly deter a US attack because
they did not have the means to retaliate against US territory with nuclear
bombs if the United States launched a first strike against the Soviet Union.
146 Chapter 12
With thirty-six ballistic missiles based in Cuba that had a 1,400-mile range,
and another twenty-four missiles each with a 2,800-mile range on the way,
the Soviet Union would be able to compensate for its deficit of long-range
missiles and have a credible deterrent. At the same time, it would provide a
powerful disincentive for the United States to use military force to overthrow
the Cuban government.
Soviet generals were more concerned than Khrushchev about the US-
USSR nuclear disparity. But the Soviet premier was compelled to respond to
their demands for a faster ICBM buildup than he wanted when they pointed
to Kennedy administration plans to spend billions more on strategic forces,
and to statements by US officials about the desirability of the “first use” of
nuclear weapons.13
From the Soviet perspective, Khrushchev ended the crisis on October 28
because he feared that the two superpowers were moving precipitously close
to the brink of nuclear war, not because he feared that the Soviet Union
would suffer conventional defeat in a war.14 The incident that most provoked
Khrushchev’s anxiety was the destruction of a U-2 reconnaissance plane over
the eastern part of Cuba by a Soviet SAM.
The United States had been sending two to four U-2s daily to take photos
of the missile sites since October 16, and there had been no Soviet attempt to
fire on the planes.15 But in the face of an expected US attack, Lt. Gen. Stepan
Grechko, commander of the Soviet air defense in Cuba, requested permis-
sion from the Kremlin on October 26 to use “all available antiaircraft means”
against US forces. He had not received approval on the morning of October
27 when Fidel Castro gave a rousing speech over the radio and ordered Cuban
anti-aircraft to open fire on any US planes. In the exhilaration of the moment
Grechko ordered three SAMs to be launched at a U-2.16
After he learned of the U-2’s downing, Khrushchev sensed he could no lon-
ger control events with verbal orders from Moscow. The one-megaton war-
heads for the ballistic missiles—each of which had a force more than sixty
times greater than the US atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—already
had arrived in Cuba. In addition, the Soviets had shipped smaller nuclear
warheads for more than 100 tactical nuclear and cruise missiles they had sent
to Cuba. Unbeknownst to the United States, several of these cruise missiles
were aimed at the US Guantánamo Naval Base.17
Moscow had ordered that the nuclear warheads not be mated to the missiles
without direct authorization. Still, Khrushchev feared that in the event of an
invasion, a local commander could overrule the order because Soviet ballistic
missiles did not have permissive action links, essentially two “keys.” More-
over, the nearly 200,000 invading US forces would likely suffer enormous
casualties if an errant general launched a tactical nuclear missile at them. The
firewall that had prevented a nuclear war until then might be breached.
In a private letter on October 26, Khrushchev had offered to remove the

missiles from Cuba in exchange for a US promise not to invade Cuba. Then
he followed with a public message on October 27, which was more like an
ultimatum. The Soviet Union would withdraw the ballistic missiles if the
United States removed its comparable missiles from Turkey, a NATO ally.
When Attorney General Robert Kennedy informed Soviet ambassador Ana-
toly Dobrynin on October 27 that “time is of the essence”—because after the
downing of the U-2 “there are many unreasonable heads among the generals,
and not only among the generals, who are ‘itching for a fight’”—Khrushchev
perceived that the world was at the brink of an unthinkable nuclear war.18 This
compelled him to accept President Kennedy’s proposed compromise. The US
president offered to accept the terms of Khrushchev’s first letter with a secret
promise to extract the US missiles in Turkey within four months.
The Soviet leader also was concerned that Fidel might do something to
increase the likelihood of a nuclear conflagration. The Cuban leader had sent
a letter to Khrushchev early on October 27 (the message was dated October
26) warning that a US air strike or an invasion was likely in the next 24 to
72 hours. Castro estimated that an invasion was “less probable although pos-
sible.” He then advised ominously that if there were a US invasion, the Soviet
Union should launch a nuclear first strike against the United States.
In Khrushchev’s mind, the Cuban leader had “lost his bearings.”19 (It is
possible that Khrushchev had not actually read Castro’s letter, but was fright-
ened by a cable from Soviet ambassador Alexander Alexseev that summa-
rized the letter before it was completed.) The Soviet premier advised Castro
on October 28 “not to be carried away by sentiment . . . by provocations,
because the Pentagon’s unbridled militarists . . . are trying to frustrate the
agreement and provoke you into actions that could be used against you.” In
a letter two days later, he told Castro that “you proposed that we be the first
to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. . . . Rather than a
simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear war.”20
Conflict Averted but Crisis Endures: The Cuban Perspective

Cuban historians tend to locate the start of the missile crisis in 1961. Govern-
ment leaders anticipated that Kennedy would retaliate against Cuba after the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Castro remarked in 1992 that “Girón, the Bay
of Pigs, was undoubtedly the prelude to the October crisis, because, for Ken-
nedy, this was a severe political blow.”21 Their expectations were on the mark.
A covert assassination plan was already under way.22
In August 1961, after the OAS meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay, White
House aide Richard Goodwin met with Che Guevara. They sat on the floor,
lotus-position style, each smoking a Cuban cigar. Goodwin reported to Ken-
148 Chapter 12
Fidel Castro’s Letter to Nikita Khrushchev, October 26, 1962*
Dear Comrade Khrushchev:

Given the analysis of the situation and the reports which have reached us, I
consider that the aggression is almost imminent within the next 24 to 72 hours.
There are two possible variants: the first and likeliest one is an air attack
against certain targets with the limited objective of destroying them; the
second, less probable although possible, is invasion. I understand that this
variant would call for a large number of forces and it is, in addition, the most
repulsive form of aggression, which might inhibit them.
You can be assured that we will firmly and resolutely resist attack, whatever
it may be.
The morale of the Cuban people is extremely high and the aggressor will
be confronted heroically.
At this time I want to convey to you briefly my personal opinion.
If the second variant is implemented and the imperialists invade Cuba
with the aim of occupying it, the danger that that aggressive policy poses for
humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never
allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first
nuclear strike against it.
I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness is
extremely dangerous and that if they actually carry out the brutal act of invading
Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment
to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear legitimate defense,
however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.
It has influenced my opinion to see how this aggressive policy is develop-
ing, how the imperialists, disregarding world public opinion and ignoring
principles and the law, are blockading the seas, violating our airspace and
preparing an invasion, while at the same time frustrating every possibility for
talks, even though they are aware of the seriousness of the problem.
You have been and continue to be a tireless defender of peace and I realize
how bitter these moments must be, when the outcome of your superhuman
efforts is so seriously threatened. However, up to the last moment we will
maintain the hope that peace will be safeguarded and we are willing to con-
tribute to this as much as we can. But at the same time, we are ready to calmly
confront a situation which we view as quite real and quite close.
Once more I convey to you the infinite gratitude and recognition of our
people to the Soviet people who have been so generous and fraternal with us,
as well as our profound gratitude and admiration to you, and wish you success
in the huge task and serious responsibilities ahead of you.
Fraternally,
Fidel Castro
* National Security Archive, Accession No. CU00754; official translation by Cuban Council of
Ministers.
nedy that Guevara had proposed Cuba and the United States find a “modus
vivendi”—a way of living together. Toward that end, Guevara also declared
that Cuba “could agree not to make any political alliance with the East.”23
The young Kennedy aide reasoned that Guevara’s outreach was due to
Cuba’s failing economy and Soviet unwillingness or inability to help Cuba
sufficiently. Given these circumstances, he judged Cuba was vulnerable, and
therefore the opportunity was ripe for the United States to mount a concerted
attack to overthrow the revolutionary government, using “economic pressure,”
“military pressure,” increased covert activities, and “propaganda.”24 Kennedy
followed up in November 1961 by authorizing Operation Mongoose, the larg-
est CIA covert operation until that time. Forty-one years later, Philip Brenner
asked Goodwin if he was embarrassed or chagrined by the advice he gave
President Kennedy. Without a shred of remorse, Goodwin shrugged and said,
“It was the Cold War. That’s how we thought then. We all did.”
Mongoose involved a multifaceted operation explicitly intended to over-
throw the Cuban government. Major General Edward Lansdale, a famed
Operation Mongoose
Authorized on November 30, 1961, by President Kennedy, Operation

Mongoose was a plan explicitly intended to “overthrow the Communist
regime and institute a new government with which the United States can live
in peace.”* It included:
• Terrorism: The CIA organized Cuban exiles to deliver supplies and weapons
to counterrevolutionary forces inside Cuba for the purpose of bombing
stores, blowing up infrastructure such as electric lines and power plants,
sabotaging factory machinery, burning fields, contaminating exports, and
attacking literacy brigade teachers.
• Isolating Cuba Politically: Beginning with a January 1962 vote in the OAS,
which suspended Cuba’s membership, the United States attempted to make
Cuba a pariah in Latin America.
• Economic Warfare: In February 1962, President Kennedy invoked the
authority granted to him by Congress to establish an embargo on all trans-
actions between Cuba and the United States, including food and medicine.
The United States also pressured European allies to cease trading with Cuba.
• Military Intimidation: The US military was directed to develop contingency
plans for intervention in Cuba, in case a civil war erupted. This led to more
extensive than usual navy exercises in the Caribbean, including one against
a fictitious island named ORTSAC, that is, CASTRO spelled backward.
* FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 291, January 18, 1962. Also see US Senate Select
Committee. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office. 1975), 139–69; Jacinto Valdés-Dapena, Operación Mangosta: Preludio de la inva-
sion directa a Cuba (Habana: Editorial Capitán San Luis, 2002).
150 Chapter 12
guerrilla fighter, became the operational director. In a meticulously detailed

plan, he estimated that the operation “aims for a revolt which can take place
in Cuba by October 1962.” He also noted that it probably would require the
use of US military forces.25
Largely because of his expectation of a US invasion, Fidel sought a mili-
tary treaty with the Soviet Union under which “an attack on Cuba would be
the equivalent to an aggression against the USSR.” But Khrushchev refused
to bring Cuba into the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led military alliance of East-
ern European communist countries. Instead, in May 1962 he offered to send
ballistic missiles to Cuba. Cuba had not asked for such weapons, which Fidel
said were “not indispensable . . . here to defend Cuba.”26
In fact, Cuban officials took a calculated risk in accepting the emplacement
of ballistic missiles on the island. The decision made Cuba a US strategic
target in the event of a major war. In addition, there was the potential that
Cuba would be perceived in Latin America as nothing more than an outpost
of the Soviet Union.
But the benefits of the decision seemed to outweigh the costs. The ballistic
missiles and associated Soviet military personnel would surely deter a US
invasion, Cuban officials reasoned. Cuba’s close collaboration with the Sovi-
ets also would serve as an endorsement of Cuba’s call for a hemisphere-wide
revolution, which Fidel had voiced in the February 1962 Second Declaration
of Havana.27
While Castro wanted to make the missile agreement public, Khrushchev
refused to do so. In June, he told Castro’s emissaries, Che Guevara and
Emilio Aragonés, that revealing the plan in advance would lead the United
States to intervene in Cuba. The Soviet leader wanted to confront his adver-
sary with a fait accompli in November 1962, on the 45th anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution.28
Ultimately Khrushchev’s position became a source of Cuban anger and
distrust. In 1968, Castro said, “we believe that the whole problem should
have been dealt with in a different manner: Cuba is a sovereign, independent
country, and has a right to own the weapons that it deems necessary. . . . From
the very outset it was a capitulation, an erosion of our sovereignty and our
right to respond to that campaign.” However, he acquiesced in the secrecy,
explaining that in 1962 he believed the Soviets “had a much better grasp of
the overall situation than we did and therefore we left the decision to them.”29
Once the United States discovered the missiles, Castro was far less ac-
cepting of supposedly superior Soviet tactical prowess. Anticipating that
Kennedy’s October 22 address would be about Cuba, Castro ordered a rapid
mobilization of the island’s forces before the speech was delivered. “The Na-
tion on a War Footing,” was the headline emblazoned across the next day’s
Revolucion, the official government newspaper. As nearly 400,000 Cuban

soldiers and militia members prepared for a US invasion over the next few
days, Castro counseled Soviet generals about the placement of SAMs and
about the need for anti-aircraft weapons to defend them.30
Castro’s intended message in his October 26 letter to Khrushchev was quite
different than the Soviet leader’s interpretation. He explained to Khrushchev
on October 31, 1962, that he was offering the Kremlin the same sort of tacti-
cal advice he was giving Soviet generals in Cuba. “I did not suggest to you,”
he wrote, “that in the midst of the crisis the USSR attack, but rather that in
the aftermath of an imperialist attack, the USSR act without vacillation and
certainly not commit the error of allowing the enemy’s chance to discharge
against her a nuclear first strike.”31
Castro assumed, incorrectly but understandably, that the United States
knew the Soviet nuclear warheads for both the ballistic and tactical nuclear
missiles had reached the island. He reasoned that if the United States
launched an invasion—not only air attacks on the missile sites—it would be
expecting the Soviet military to respond with nuclear weapons. Given those
conditions, he calculated that the United States would use nuclear weapons
as an adjunct to the invasion, perhaps even attacking the Soviet Union first.
Imagine Castro’s surprise to hear on October 28—by way of a radio broad-
cast, without the courtesy of a prior telephone call from Khrushchev or the
Soviet ambassador—that the Soviets had agreed to remove the missiles. He
did not find the Soviet explanation for the oversight credible—that Khru
shchev did not consult him because there was a lack of time given the urgency
of the situation. In fact, Khrushchev made the decision to remove the missiles
three days earlier, which gave him sufficient time to inform Castro about the
change in the Soviets’ position and to consult with the Cubans about strategy.
The Soviet fear of nuclear war was real, but lack of time was not the rea-
son for failing to consult with the Cubans. The Soviet leaders thought that if
they involved Castro in negotiations, a peaceful resolution of the crisis would
have been more difficult. They believed the Cuban leader was not ready to
compromise. In his memoirs, Khrushchev scornfully remarked, “In those
days, you know, Fidel was very fiery . . . he hadn’t even thought about the
obvious consequences of his proposal, which placed the world on the brink
of destruction.”32
On October 28, Cuba notified Acting Secretary-General U Thant that Cuba
wanted five demands satisfied before it would permit international verifica-
tion that the ballistic missiles had been removed. They were: (1) Cease the
US economic embargo and US pressure on other countries to cut commercial
links to Cuba; (2) end US subversive activities against Cuba; (3) stop US
supported “piratical attacks” from bases in the United States and Puerto Rico;
152 Chapter 12
(4) discontinue US violations of Cuban airspace; and (5) US withdrawal from

Guantánamo Naval Base.33
Soviet leaders judged that if they included any of Cuba’s demands, their
negotiations with the United States would have been even more complicated.
Yet if the Soviet leaders had been less dismissive of their Cuban allies, they
might have found Kennedy willing to accept at least one of Cuba’s require-
ments, that the United States meet with Cuba face-to-face to discuss Cuba’s
complaints about US aggression.34 A Soviet demand for direct negotiations
between Cuba and the United States also would have acknowledged that
Cuba’s conflict with the United States was the source of the crisis, and that
Cuba had the sovereign right to negotiate its own fate.
Yet the leader of a superpower has difficulty in thinking this way. Khru
shchev and Kennedy were able to empathize with each other more easily than
either could with Castro. In accepting Kennedy’s stipulation that international
inspectors confirm the missiles’ removal, Khrushchev cavalierly ignored Cu-
ban sovereignty. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had asked
Cuba for permission to make inspections on Cuban territory, and Fidel re-
fused to allow inspectors to enter the country.
Meanwhile, the United States continued surveillance flights in Cuban
airspace. Indeed, the crisis did not actually end on October 28, because the
United States maintained its strategic forces at Defense Condition 2 (DEF-
CON-2), the highest state of alert short of nuclear war. Its full might remained
at a hair trigger, where the slightest error might have set off Armageddon.
THE NOVEMBER CRISIS
Such were the circumstances when Soviet deputy premier Mikoyan arrived in
Cuba on November 2. Khrushchev had sent him halfway around the world to
gain Cuban acquiescence in some form of international inspection, because
that issue had become an obstacle to concluding the crisis. Mikoyan also
hoped to assuage the anger of Cuba’s leaders.35
But Castro was unyielding. He told Mikoyan on November 4, “We cannot
take that step. If we agree to an inspection, then it is as if we permit the United
States of America to determine what we can or cannot do in foreign policy.
That hurts our sovereignty.”36
Adding injury to insult, Khrushchev had volunteered to remove all Soviet
troops from the island. Recalling this decision in 1968, Castro noted scorn-
fully that Kennedy’s demands “did not include those divisions, which were
not offensive or strategic weapons.” This decision, Castro said, “was a freely
granted concession to top off the concession of the withdrawal of the strategic
missiles.”37 Moreover, Khrushchev acquiesced to Kennedy’s demands to take
back both obsolete IL-28 bombers and Komar patrol boats, which had been
delivered to Cuba to ward off attacks from Operation Mongoose operatives.
The Soviet retreat on the IL-28s and Komars, despite a firm promise to
Cuba that they would not be removed, was the final confirmation of Soviet
treachery from Castro’s viewpoint. Five years later he explained that Cuba
found itself in “the special circumstance of . . . an aggressive and embold-
ened enemy, an ally on the retreat and . . . our resolve to prevent relations
with that ally from deteriorating to the point of rupture.”38 Thus for Cuba,
the crisis was never fully resolved. “An international conflict was avoided,”
Castro observed in 1992, “but peace had not been achieved. For our coun-
try, there was no peace.”39
Mikoyan could not understand this point of view. Like other Soviet offi-
cials, he was unable to comprehend the anger that Cuba’s leaders expressed
about the outcome of the confrontation. He said to Fidel and Raúl Castro, Che
Guevara, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, and Osvaldo Dortícos in November 1962,
“Let our enemies die. We must live and live. . . . Sometimes, in order to take
two steps forward,” Mikoyan advised, “it is necessary to take a step back.”40
But this was not a choice the Cubans felt they had. The Soviet Union was a
large country. It could absorb defeats. For Cuba, a small country, a defeat by
the other superpower essentially would mean annihilation.
The crisis formally ended on January 7, 1963, with two letters to UN Act-
ing Secretary-General U Thant. One was a joint letter from the United States
and the Soviet Union. The other was from Cuba alone.41 The occasion was
reminiscent of the treaty signing in 1898 that ended Spain’s colonial domina-
tion of Cuba. Cuba had been excluded, and only the United States and Spain
ratified the treaty.
CUBA’S LESSONS
Cuba’s dilemma was daunting at the end of the missile crisis. As the location
of the nuclear confrontation that US leaders understood came harrowingly
close to a devastating war, Cuba had become a mortal enemy of the United
States in the very heart of the traditional US sphere of domination. The
Cubans surmised that any appearance of weakness would stimulate a US
impulse to rid itself of this threat in the Caribbean. While Cuba had strength-
ened its military after the Bay of Pigs invasion, it still lacked a meaningful
air force, navy, and anti-aircraft weaponry, and it had even lost the obsolete
154 Chapter 12
IL-28 bombers. Meanwhile, the Soviets demonstrated to the Cuban leaders

that they cared more about maintaining a positive relationship with their
superpower adversary than they did about their small socialist ally. “We real-
ized,” Castro told the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee in 1968,
“how alone we would be in the event of a war.”42
Cuban leaders viewed the US no-invasion guarantee and Soviet promises
of protection as hollow. Both countries had ignored Cuba’s interests during
the crisis and its immediate aftermath. Terrorist attacks resumed even while
US forces were at DEFCON-2 in November 1962.43 Castro’s suspicion that
the Soviets were treating Cuba as a bargaining chip were confirmed in 1963
during a trip to the Soviet Union, when he learned inadvertently that Kennedy
had agreed secretly to remove US missiles in Turkey in exchange for Soviet
ones in Cuba.44
Trusting neither superpower, Cuba attempted to codify the Kennedy-
Khrushchev agreement in a UN Security Council protocol that also would
have addressed Cuba’s desire to end the US economic embargo and engage
the United States in negotiations over the Guantánamo Naval Base.45 But the
United States refused to consider negotiating the proposed protocol and the
Soviets did not insist on it.
Cuban fear of the United States and distrust of the Soviet Union provided
the motivation for a new international approach around which the revolution-
ary government organized its foreign policy for the remainder of the 1960s.
This is the topic we take up in the next chapter.
NOTES
1. Edmundo Desnoes, Inconsolable Memories (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-

sity Press, 1990), 171–72.
2. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Letter to Fidel,” 1965; read by Fidel Castro Ruz in a
speech delivered to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party on October
3, 1965, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1965/esp/f031065e.html. [Transla-
tion by the authors.]
3. James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle
with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002), 256n81.
4. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 271. Also see Tomás Diez Acosta, October
1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2002);
James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the
Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002,
enlarged paperback edition); Ramón Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA: Diez tiempos de
una relación (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2012), 152–55.
5. This summary of the US understanding of the crisis is repeated in the revised
edition: Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the
Cuban Missile Crisis, second edition (New York: Longman, 1999), 77.
6. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 383, August 22, 1962, and FRUS,
1961–1963, volume X, Document 386, August 23, 1962.
7. United States, Atlantic Command. 1963. CINCLANT Historical Account of
Cuban Crisis. Serial: 000119/J09H, April 29; National Security Archive, Accession
No. CC03087, 39–40.
8. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton,
2003), 493–500; Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev,
1960–1963 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 224–28.
9. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on
the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 216–17; Sheldon M.
Stern, Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile
Crisis Meetings (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).
10. Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and David A. Welch, eds., Back to the
Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Janu-
ary 27–28, 1989, CSIA Occasional Paper No. 9 (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1992), 36.
11. Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, ed. Sergei Khrushchev, trans.
George Shriver (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 321.
12. Anatoli I. Gribkov and William Y. Smith, Operation ANADYR: US and Soviet
Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chicago: edition q, 1994), 13; Aleksandr
Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Ken-
nedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 170–71.
13. Gribkov and Smith, Operation ANADYR, 10–11.
14. Sergo Mikoyan and Svetlana Savranskaya, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis:
Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2012), 186–89; James G. Blight, The Shattered Crystal
Ball: Fear and Learning in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Savage, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1990), chapters 7 and 8.
15. Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile
Crisis (New York: Random House, 1991), 461.
16. Gribkov and Smith, Operation ANADYR, 66–67.
17. Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight, 248–49.
18. “Dobrynin’s Cable to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, 27 October 1962,” Cold
War International History Project Bulletin 5 (Spring 1995): 79–80.
19. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 348.
20. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 510–11, 514.
21. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 196.
22. National Archives and Records Administration, JFK Assassination System,
Record Series: JFK; Record Number: 104-10213-10101; Agency File Number:
80TO1357A; released June 23, 1998.
23. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 257, August 22, 1961.
156 Chapter 12
24. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 258, August 22, 1961.

25. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 304, February 20, 1962.
27. “Manifesto for the Liberation of the Americas: ‘The Second Declaration of
Havana,’” in Fidel Castro Reader, ed. David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal
(Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2007).
28. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 331; Blight et al., Cuba on the
Brink, 83–84, 349–351.
29. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist
Party,” January 25–26, 1968, in Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the
Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, James G. Blight and Philip Brenner (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 41–42.
31. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 55.
32. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 348.
33. “Fija Fidel Las Cinco Garantias Contra La Agresion a Cuba,” Revolucion,
October 29, 1962.
35. Mikoyan and Savranskaya, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 195–207.
36. “Mikoyan’s Mission to Havana: Cuban-Soviet Negotiations, November 1962,”
Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 5 (Spring 1995): 95.
37. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 57–58.
40. “Mikoyan’s Mission to Havana,” 108, 159.
41. Carlos Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev, Kennedy and the
Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), 176–81.
43. Desmond Fitzgerald, “Memorandum for the Record,” FRUS, 1961–1963, vol.
XI, Document no. 348, June 19, 1963, 837–38.
44. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 224–25.
45. Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm, 139–44.
Chapter 13
Foreign Policy in the 1960s

Exporting Revolution, Chinese Flirtations,
Soviet Tensions
First of all I raised the question of policy with regard to Latin America. Fi-
del said: you don’t accept our policy toward the countries of Latin America.
I responded: yes, we don’t accept. And the controversy began. I said to
Fidel: conducting revolution in the countries of Latin America through
expediting there a few people is adventurous. Fidel responded: “So was the
Cuban revolution too?” He added that Che Guevara is fighting in Bolivia
and has successes. Most of the communist parties in Latin America are not
parties—said Fidel—but Marxist clubs. He was particularly angry at Ven-
ezuela. He called them traitors, saying that communist parties have become
bureaucratized, lost their revolutionary character and interest in leading
their nations to a revolution. We believe, he said, in a military coup and in
the formation of popular-revolutionary parties, which in Bolivia are created
by Che Guevara. I responded: I have not heard that he had been invited by
the Bolivians. Fidel said he had been invited. I expressed my opinion on
the communist parties in those countries. Fidel disagreed with me. But all
the time (we chatted the whole night) he was repeatedly raising this subject.
Then he took up our letter and said: you have said here that if we continue
taking such position and conduct such activity in other countries, there will
be conflicts and you will not take responsibility on yourselves. Thus, you
learned that we were under threat and you sent out to us such letter to wash
your hands of this matter. He was saying all of this in a quite abrasive tone.
—Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, “Report on Trip to Cuba,” July 19671
OUTREACH TO THE UNITED STATES FAILS
Only a few weeks after the missile crisis, Cuba resumed negotiations with the
United States over the release of the 1,113 surviving Bay of Pigs invaders,
157
158 Chapter 13
and quickly lowered its demands. Cuba accepted $53 million worth of food,
medicine, and medical equipment in exchange for the prisoners’ release. On
December 29, 1962, President Kennedy promised a joyful crowd of 40,000
at Miami’s Orange Bowl that he would return Brigade 2506’s flag to these
fighters “in a free Havana.”
In 1963, US intelligence analysts noted that Castro had toned down his
anti-American rhetoric after the missile crisis, and had indicated “through
various channels, public as well as private, that he is interested in an accom-
modation with the United States.”2 In fact, the Cuban leader used a January
1963 trip by James Donovan, a New York attorney who had negotiated the
release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, to float a proposal for Cuba and the
United States to normalize relations.3
As Donovan prepared to return to Cuba in March, the CIA and State
Department recommended three nonnegotiable guidelines for the lawyer to
convey to the Cuban prime minister: (1) that “Castro . . . must get the Rus-
sians out of Cuba lock, stock and barrel”; (2) that he “must agree to stop all
Communist subversion efforts directed at Latin America”; (3) that he should
“throw the Communists out of his government.”4 But Kennedy wanted to be
more conciliatory. He overruled the recommendation, saying that Donovan’s
instructions should not include “the breaking of Sino/Soviet ties.” McGeorge
Bundy, the national security adviser, wrote that the president declared, “We
should start thinking along more flexible lines.”5
The January proposal was the first of several possible openings between
the two countries that year. Others involved Lisa Howard of ABC News, the
first woman to anchor a major network news program, Ambassador Wil-
liam Attwood, a former editor of Look magazine, and Jean Daniel, a French
journalist. Daniel was meeting with Castro on November 22, 1963, when the
two men learned of Kennedy’s assassination, which essentially shut off US
receptivity to normalization feelers.6
Despite these efforts by both countries to develop a rapprochement, the
Kennedy administration reactivated its assassination program aimed at the
top Cuban leaders and in June 1963 renewed its support for anti-Castro ter-
rorists.7 President Lyndon Johnson stopped supporting them in 1964, worried
that the so-called autonomous groups had become too independent after one
attacked a Spanish freighter, the Sierra Aranzazu, believing it was a Cu-
ban vessel.8 Confronted by what seemed to be an ongoing US threat and a
worthless Soviet defense commitment, Cuba’s leaders in 1963 modified the
country’s foreign policy and aimed it at three goals: to acquire economic and
military security; to transform the third world through revolutions that would
change the world’s balance of power in favor of the poor; and to establish
Cuba’s independence from foreign domination.
Foreign Policy in the 1960s 159
DEPLOYING A NEW FOREIGN POLICY
Repairing Relations with the Soviet Union

The Cuban leaders’ angry reaction to the Soviet withdrawal of missiles,
bombers, and patrol boats generated so much tension that it actually threat-
ened the Cuban-Soviet relationship. Attempting to prevent a break in Janu-
ary 1963, Khrushchev wrote a 27-page personal letter to Castro, inviting the
Cuban prime minister to visit the Soviet Union. Castro recalled in 1968 that
“It was a bucolic letter, poetic in many ways.”9 Khrushchev recommended
that Castro travel when the weather would be warmer, and the Cuban leader
arrived on April 27.
During a five-week grand tour, Fidel was treated repeatedly to red-carpet
welcomes and large enthusiastic crowds. He returned to Havana with an
agreement for military hardware, including anti-aircraft guns and eighty
World War II–vintage tanks, construction equipment, development loans,
oil shipments, and a Soviet guarantee to defend Cuba from aggression, even
if that required the use of nuclear weapons. Khrushchev also agreed to leave
a three-thousand-person brigade in Cuba to act as a kind of trip wire against
a US invasion.10
In turn, Castro promised that Cuba would abandon economic plans for
import substitution and increase sugar production with guaranteed deliver-
ies to the Soviet bloc. Most important from Khrushchev’s perspective, the
Cuban leader agreed to moderate his stance on armed struggle by conceding
that the path to socialism should be determined by the people in each country
according to their circumstances, in order to achieve “the Leninist policy of
peaceful coexistence.”11
The trip provided Cuba with the economic and military security it sought.
Castro’s success on the trip was partly due to a card in his hand, which he
played deftly—the China card. Sino-Soviet hostility had intensified by 1963
as both countries claimed to be the natural leader of the third world. Cuba
was one of the twenty-five founding members of the recently created Non-
Aligned Movement, which had become the principal forum for the world’s
poor countries. Were Cuba to break with the Soviet Union and favor China, it
could have been a significant blow to the legitimacy of Soviet aspirations for
leadership, especially in Latin America.
In reality, Castro would have gained little from actually playing the card,
because China had far less than the Soviet Union did to offer Cuba. Indeed,
when we asked him in a 2002 interview why Cuba had opted for close rela-
tions with the Soviet Union instead of China in the Sino-Soviet split, Presi-
dent Castro told us succinctly, “The Soviet Union had oil.” By late 1964, it
was clear to the Chinese leaders which side Cuba had chosen. They even
160 Chapter 13
rebuffed Che Guevara, seemingly the member of Cuba’s leadership most

favorably inclined to China, when he went to Beijing in January 1965 seek-
ing to assuage Chinese anger toward Cuba.12 Still, in May 1963 Khrushchev
could not be certain about the decision Cuba would make.
Exporting Revolution
The risky and unconventional second part of Cuba’s strategy was the support
of revolutions throughout the third world. The full extent of Cuba’s contribu-
tions to antigovernment guerrilla groups and independence movements in the
1960s still remains uncertain. We do know that Cuba put more effort into such
support after the missile crisis.
Cuban leaders reasoned in 1963 that they could not base the country’s
long-term development on hopes of the US embargo ending, or on the good-
will of an untrustworthy Soviet Union that had its own economic problems.
Cuba needed trading partners that could potentially remove themselves from
either superpower’s sphere, such as resource-rich third world states that were
still colonies or were in neocolonial relationships with the advanced industrial
countries. If these states gained their independence and shared Cuba’s revo-
lutionary ideology, then they might provide an alternative to dependence on
the United States or the Soviet Union.13
In addition, all the world’s poor could benefit from this plan, which en-
hanced its attractiveness to Cuba’s leaders. Indeed, from the start they had
asserted the Revolution was committed to “proletarian internationalism,” a
loosely defined concept that conveyed the idea of a historic mission grander
than the liberation of only one country. Castro proclaimed a version of this
vision in the 1962 Second Declaration of Havana when he declared, “The
duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. It is true that the revo-
lution will triumph in the Americas and throughout the world, but it is not for
revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse
of imperialism to pass by.”14
The policy of exporting revolution would seem to have contradicted
Cuba’s security goal—the centerpiece was reducing the US threat—because
supporting third world revolutions was likely to antagonize the United States.
But Castro remarked in a 1992 conference that he believed US hostility had
little to do with Cuba’s actual behavior. “The United States is always invent-
ing something new in connection with Cuba,” he said. “You never know what
the next reason is going to be.”15
Applying what could be called a “strategy of the weak,” Castro hoped
that by fanning the flames of revolution in a wide variety of locations, Cuba
would force the United States to “overextend” itself as it attempted to sup-
press insurrections everywhere, and at the same time its attention would be
distracted away from Cuba.16 Che Guevara famously alluded to this idea in
his 1967 message “from somewhere in the world” to the Organization of the
Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). He
wrote, “How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many
Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe.”17
Avoiding Foreign Domination

After the missile crisis, Cuba and the Soviet Union locked horns on several
issues, as Fidel tried to demonstrate that Cuba would not allow itself to be
controlled by the Soviet Union. Despite Soviet requests, Cuba refused to sign
both the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty and the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which
declared Latin America a nuclear-free zone. When the Soviet Union and its
Eastern Europe allies broke diplomatic relations with Israel during the June
1967 Six-Day War, Cuba maintained its diplomatic relations with the Jewish
state. Che Guevara, speaking on behalf of the Cuban government at a 1965 con-
ference in Algeria, castigated the Soviets for their regressive ideological views
and for their immorality in not adequately supporting liberation movements.18
In January 1966, Cuba frontally challenged the Soviet Union’s claim to be
the natural leader of the third world. It brought more than five hundred del-
egates to Havana from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to the Tricontinental
Conference. The purpose: to initiate an organization dedicated to promoting
and supporting armed liberation struggles on the three continents.19 Soviet
leaders nominally endorsed the Tricontinental Conference, which they hoped
would undermine China’s influence with revolutionary movements. But they
repeatedly admonished Castro—before and after the conference—to back
away from supporting armed struggle.20
Soviet officials thus were startled by the conference’s open call for global
violent revolution. (They also may have been affronted by the barely veiled
criticisms during the meeting of alleged weak Soviet support for North Viet-
nam.) Castro received prolonged applause when he declared in his closing
speech that “the world is big, and the imperialists are everywhere, and for
the Cuban revolutionaries the field of battle against imperialism spans the
whole world.”21 Even worse, from the Soviet viewpoint, the Tricontinental
Conference established OSPAAAL, headquartered in Havana, to spearhead
the global struggle. Subsequently, Cuba invited mostly noncommunist revo-
lutionary movements to the first meeting of the Organization for Latin Ameri-
can Solidarity, an OSPAAAL offshoot.22
Meanwhile, with Cuba’s support, Guevara had gone to Africa in 1965 to
work with insurgents in the Congo and Guinea-Bissau. He returned briefly to
162 Chapter 13
Cuba in 1966, and then headed to Bolivia with a small group of revolutionar-
ies to begin a guerrilla struggle there against the government.
In June 1967, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin pointedly told Castro that
he should have informed the Soviets in advance about Guevara’s expedition,
and that such activities in Latin America only harmed the communist cause.
Unbowed, Castro responded critically that the Soviet leaders had abandoned
their own revolutionary tradition.23
From Fidel’s perspective, the Soviet reaction to his criticism was a nearly
unforgiveable act. In October 1967, Bolivian rangers supported by a US
Special Forces team captured and killed Guevara. It was a terrible blow to
Castro. He blamed his comrade’s death on the Bolivian Communist Party
and, by implication, on their Soviet masters.24 Shortly afterward, both Fi-
del and Raúl Castro were conspicuously absent at the fiftieth anniversary
celebration in Moscow of the “Great October Revolution,” and they chose
to absent Cuba from a Soviet-organized preparatory meeting of world com-
munist parties in Budapest.25
The fault line in the Cuban-Soviet bond was widening. Support for na-
tional liberation movements had exactly the opposite strategic value for
the Soviet Union and Cuba. The Soviets believed that their own security
depended on easing tensions with the United States, a policy they called
“peaceful coexistence.” To Cuba, peaceful coexistence meant accepting US
domination of Latin America. It also seemed to imply an acquiescence to
informal deals between the two superpowers at the expense of small, poor
countries such as Cuba.26
A FATEFUL 1968: “WE WILL FOLLOW OUR OWN ROAD”
Cuba was now at a crossroads. Castro could not allow the Cuban-Soviet
relationship to reach a breaking point. He had no other option but to reduce
the tension and cease his open challenges to Soviet leadership. This was
underscored by a Soviet decision to reduce Cuba’s anticipated oil shipments
for 1968. On January 2, 1968, Castro publicly reported the troublesome news
about oil deliveries, warning Cubans that the shortfall would require new
limits on gasoline purchases, greater conservation efforts, and a reliance on
alternative sources of fuel to run sugar mills. He held out the hope that the
hardships would be temporary, lasting at most for three years.27 By achiev-
ing a goal of harvesting ten million tons of sugar in 1970, the Cuban leader
promised, Cuba would earn enough hard currency to be self-reliant.
While Fidel would tone down his public criticism of Soviet foreign policy,
he would not have Cuba play the role of supine lapdog. He was determined
to make the Soviet Union give Cuba respect befitting an equal, or at least a
fully sovereign country. Cuba’s effort to traverse a narrow strait—between
the rocks of a total break with the Soviet Union and the shoals of total capitu-
lation to its superpower patron—made 1968 a fateful transition year.
Purge of the “Micro-Faction”

The journey began on January 23, at a meeting of the entire Cuban Com-
munist Party (PCC) Central Committee, the first such conclave since the
new Communist Party’s founding in October 1965. The main purpose was to
conduct a “trial” of thirty-seven party members, labeled the “micro-faction.”
Most prominent among them was Aníbal Escalante, a leader of the PSP
before 1959 and an ardent pro-Soviet critic of Castro. Raúl Castro, suppos-
edly the brother who was most sympathetic to the Soviet Union, chaired the
sessions, which found the Escalante contingent guilty of “treasonable and
counterrevolutionary activities.” They had conspired with Soviet embassy
officials, according to Raúl’s report, and provided the Soviets with false and
viciously anti-Castro information. What made this behavior treasonable was
the unproven claim that the conspiracy’s ultimate objective was a Soviet-
backed coup, a transfer of power to a group of Moscow-aligned communists
led by Escalante.28
While official denunciations of the micro-faction avoided blaming the
Soviet Union directly, Castro’s message to Soviet leaders was evident: if you
want to work with Cuba, you will need to work with Cuba’s revolutionary
government. Moscow seemed to have understood the message.29
Questioning Soviet Commitments: “Feeble-Minded Bureaucrats”

The micro-faction trial was reported in Cuban newspapers and was open
to Communist Party officials from other countries. But a closed session
ensued after the trial during which Fidel Castro castigated the Soviet lead-
ers for their lack of both loyalty to Cuba and commitment to revolutionary
goals. The text of the speech was secret, and remained so for more than
thirty years. In it, Castro recounted the history of the 1962 October Crisis
from the Cuban perspective.30
Castro was unable to ascertain Escalante’s popularity among the members
of the Central Committee because the new group was so new. The Cuban
leader apparently believed he needed to justify the micro-faction purge in
terms that went beyond the formal charges, and he used the missile crisis as
an object lesson about Soviet incompetence and unreliability. In effect, he
argued that the purge was necessary to protect Cuban sovereignty, because
164 Chapter 13
the micro-faction allegedly wanted to turn Cuba into a Soviet pawn, which
would have placed Cuba’s fate in the hands of “feeble-minded bureaucrats.”31
Despite the speech’s secrecy, the Soviet leaders apparently learned what Fidel
had said and responded by suspending shipments of military supplies to Cuba
and curtailing their technical assistance and training.32
Undaunted, in March 1968, Fidel proclaimed the beginning of a “revolu-
tionary offensive,” which further unnerved those in Moscow who wondered
about the wisdom of continuing the current relationship with Cuba. In a pas-
sionate speech on March 13, he announced the government would nationalize
56,000 small businesses—restaurants and bars, barbers, taxis and street ven-
dors, and consumer services such as shoe and car repair shops—and shutter
nightclubs such as the famed Tropicana. The order in effect closed all of the
remaining private enterprises in the country other than small farms. “Gentle-
men,” the Cuban leader thundered, “a Revolution was not made here in order
to establish the right to do business.”33
Thus seemingly focused on the domestic economy and against a culture of
materialism, the “offensive” was closely linked to Cuba’s evolving foreign
policy. Fidel made this point clear in the same speech, declaring: “We will
follow our own road, we will build our Revolution and we will do it fun-
damentally by our effort. . . . Let us fight bravely, among other reasons, to
minimize our dependence on all that is foreign.”
Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: “Not the Slightest Trace

of Legality Exists”
Castro had made clear his position about Cuban sovereignty. It was time to
let the Soviets know that he would not push them to the breaking point. That
opportunity arose on August 21, 1968. Armored divisions of Soviet and other
Warsaw Pact forces moved across Czechoslovakia’s borders, crushing the
“Prague Spring,” an attempt to construct what its leader Alexander Dubček
called “socialism with a human face.” Western European socialist and com-
munist parties uniformly condemned the Soviet intervention and declared
sympathy for the Czech reformers. Even Cuban media coverage of develop-
ments in the months preceding August had a striking pro-reform bias. Cubans
saw the reformers as brave pioneers, trying to construct their own approach
to socialism independent of the Soviet Union.
Apart from their sympathy for the goals of the Prague Spring movement,
Cuban leaders were wary of Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid
Brezhnev’s justification for the invasion. In what became known as the
Brezhnev Doctrine, he said that a great power had the right to intervene to con-
trol an errant smaller power within its sphere of influence. If Cuba accepted
that justification, it would have endorsed a rationale the United States had used
repeatedly to intervene in Latin America.
These considerations were tempered by charges that the United States
and its allies had taken advantage of Czechoslovakia’s new openness to ma-
nipulate the movement’s leaders and Czech public opinion, in the very way
Cuban leaders imagined the United States would try to penetrate an “open”
Cuban society and encourage antirevolutionary behavior and values.34 This
was one reason Castro emphasized in his March “revolutionary offensive”
speech that a true revolutionary is someone motivated by moral incentives,
not materialism. He was targeting US counterculture attitudes that had be-
come increasingly popular among Cubans under thirty, which Cuban leaders
viewed as individualistic. The fear of the counterculture as a leading edge of
US cultural imperialism was so great that Cuban officials banished the music
of the Beatles from the island.35
Fidel waited for nearly three days after the Soviet invasion to give Cuba’s
response. His silence during that period was resounding. By 1968, Cuba
had become the reference point for anti-imperialism globally. Protesters at
Columbia University who seized campus buildings, students in Mexico City
who were beaten (and later killed) by police, and reformers in Prague who
threw rocks at Soviet tanks wore T-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara’s
image. Hopeful idealists throughout the world wanted to know Fidel Castro’s
reaction. Would he be willing to risk a break with the Soviet Union by de-
nouncing the invasion?
The decision weighed on him heavily. When he was ready to speak, on
August 23, he chose an austere setting—alone at a desk, on a television set,
with only a Che Guevara portrait and the Cuban flag behind him. Castro
somberly opened his address to the nation uncharacteristically, almost with
an apology: “Some of the things that we are going to state here will be, in
some cases, in contradiction with the emotions of many; in other cases, in
contradiction with our own interests.”36 Saul Landau, a US filmmaker and
historian, was in the television studio at the time, working on his prize-
winning documentary, Fidel. He recalls that “Fidel was obviously uncom-
fortable. He read his speech—he usually spoke without notes—and then he
just rushed out.”37
Castro’s presentation was a carefully worded lawyer’s brief, which argued
that the Prague Spring reforms were leading in the direction of splintering
the socialist bloc and undermining international socialism. “And our point of
view,” he stated, “is that the socialist camp has the right to prevent this one
way or another. . . . We acknowledge the bitter necessity that called for the
sending of those forces into Czechoslovakia; we do not condemn the socialist
countries that made that decision.”38
166 Chapter 13
This was the statement on which many analyses of Cuban-Soviet relations

have dwelled, suggesting that August 1968 was the point when Cuba caved
in and accepted Soviet domination. But Castro was far from done, and what
he declared later in the address informs us about the terms under which he
was willing to accept Soviet leadership. He argued, now with passion, that the
Soviet intervention “unquestionably entailed a violation of legal principles
and international norms. . . . Because what cannot be denied here is that the
sovereignty of the Czechoslovak State was violated.” He could justify the
invasion only in political terms, to maintain the unity of the “socialist camp”
so that it could advance international socialism. “In our opinion,” he said,
“the decision made concerning Czechoslovakia can only be explained from a
political point of view, not from a legal point of view. Not the slightest trace
of legality exists.”
Now, if the only justification is political, he reasoned, then the social-
ist camp must be consistent. It would be obliged also to engage itself to a
greater degree in “Vietnam if the Yankee imperialists step up their aggres-
sion against that country . . . the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea if
the Yankee imperialists attack that country . . . Cuba if the Yankee imperial-
ists attack our country.”39
Less an endorsement than a noncondemnation of the Soviet invasion,
Castro thus threw a gauntlet in front of the Soviets, conditioning Cuban ac-
quiescence in the illegal invasion on the Soviets’ willingness to support revo-
lutionary struggles. As with his pointed admonitions earlier in 1968—that
the Soviets should not interfere in Cuban domestic politics or try to dictate
the character of Cuba’s economy—Castro now asserted that Cuba’s relations
with the Soviet Union had to be based on mutual respect and a shared com-
mitment to a worldwide socialist revolution.40
In practice, the lofty rhetoric gave way to the reality of Cuba’s vulnerabili-
ties. The Soviets acknowledged their appreciation of Cuba’s noncondemna-
tion with symbolic initiatives such as exchanging visits by the Soviet and
Cuban defense ministers. But a meaningful change in the relationship did
not occur immediately. Only after Cuba failed to achieve the ambitious goal
of harvesting ten million tons of sugar in 1970 did it readily welcome Soviet
economic and military assistance.
NOTES
1. “Kosygin’s Report on Trip to Cuba to Meeting of Communist Party First Sec-
retaries, Budapest, Hungary, 12 July 1967,” Cold War International History Project
(CWIHP), Washington, DC. KC PZPRXIA/13, AAN, Warsaw. Obtained by James
Hershberg. Translated by Jan Chowaniec. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/docu

ment/115803.
2. FRUS 1961–1963, vol. XI, Document no. 349, June 20, 1963.
3. FRUS 1961–1963, vol. XI, Document no. 275, January 26, 1963.
4. As quoted in LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 63.
5. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 64.
6. Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm, 197–208; LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back
Channel to Cuba, 67–78.
7. Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations Against Cuba,
1959–1965 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), chapters 7 and 9; FRUS
1961–1963, vol. XI, Document nos. 346, 348, 388, June 8, 1963, June 19, 1963,
December 19, 1963.
8. Bohning, The Castro Obsession, 217–18.
9. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party,”
January 25–26, 61–63. The full text of the letter is available at: “Letter from Khru
shchev to Fidel Castro,” January 31, 1963, History and Public Policy Program Digital
Archive, Archive of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation (AVPRF), http://digitalar
chive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114507.
10. Jacques Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution: Soviet Ideological
and Strategical Perspectives, 1959–77, trans. Deanna Drendel Leboeuf (New York:
Praeger, 1978), 91–96; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 329–34.
11. “Text of Joint Statement, Tass in Russian to Europe 2255 GMT 24 May 1963,”
in “Material on Castro Visit in Soviet Union,” Foreign Broadcast Information Service
(FBIS), USSR International Affairs, May 27, 1963, BB13; Jorge I. Domínguez, To
Make the World Safe for Democracy: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 64–66.
12. US Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Report, “The Sino-Soviet
Struggle in the World Communist Movement Since Khrushchev’s Fall,” Part 1,
September 1967, http://www.foia.cia.gov/document/intelligence-report-sino-soviet
-struggle-world-communist-movement-kruschevs-fall-part-1, 113.
13. H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s International Relations: The Anatomy of a Na-
tionalistic Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 27–28.
14. “The Second Declaration of Havana,” 264.
15. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 298, 300.
16. “Playboy Interview: Fidel Castro,” Playboy, January 1967, 70; Blight and
Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 86–88.
17. Ernesto (Che) Guevara, “Vietnam and the World Struggle for Freedom,” in
Che Guevara Speaks, ed. George Lavan (New York: Pathfinder, 1967), 159.
18. Ernesto (Che) Guevara, “Speech in Algiers to the Second Seminar of the Or-
ganization of Afro-Asian Solidarity, February 25, 1965,” in Che Guevara Speaks, ed.
George Lavan (New York: Pathfinder, 1967), 107–8.
19. US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “The Tricontinental Confer-
ence of African, Asian and Latin American Peoples, A Staff Study,” 89th Cong., 2nd
Sess., June 7, 1966.
168 Chapter 13
20. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 102–4.

21. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en el Acto Clausura en la Primera Conferencia
de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, Africa y America Latina,” el 15 de enero de
1966,” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1966/esp/f150166e.html.
22. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 270–71; W. Raymond
Duncan, The Soviet Union and Cuba: Interests and Influence (New York: Praeger,
1985), 66–72.
23. “Kosygin’s Report on Trip to Cuba to Meeting of Communist Party First
Secretaries, Budapest, Hungary, 12 July 1967,” History and Public Policy Program
Digital Archive, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington,
DC, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115803. Also see: CIA Intel-
ligence Information Cable, IN-73140, October 17, 1967; Subjects: “Background of
Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin’s Visit to Havana; Content of Discussions Between
Kosygin and Cuban Premier Fidel Castro,” 2–3; available through Declassified Docu-
ments Reference System (DDRS), Gale Cengage Learning.
24. Saul Landau, “Filming Fidel: A Cuban Diary, 1968,” Monthly Review 59, no.
3 (July–August 2007).
25. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 130–31.
26. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 96–97.
27. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso Pronunciado al Conmemorarse el IX Aniversario
del Triunfo de la Revolucion,” January 2, 1968, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discur
sos/1968/esp/f020168e.html.
28. Granma, International Edition (English), February 4 and 11, 1968; Blight and
Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 133–37. Castro used the Escalante case as evidence
of the Soviet character in 1977 when he reportedly warned Angolan president Antonio
Aghostino Neto about the possibility of a Soviet-sponsored coup. See Piero Gleijeses,
Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern
Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 73–77.
29. SED CC Department of International Relations, “Information on the Third
Plenum of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party and on the Attacks
of the Cuban Communist Party against the Socialist Unity Party of Germany,” Janu-
ary 31, 1968, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter
.org/document/115812.
30. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 35–71.
32. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 75; Yuri Pavlov, Soviet–
Cuban Alliance: 1959–1961 (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994), 89.
33. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Commemorating the 11th Anniversary of the March
13, 1957, Action Held at the Steps of the University of Havana,” March 13, 1968.
The Spanish is “¡Señores, no se hizo una revolución aquí para establecer el derecho al
comercio!” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1968/esp/f130368e.html.
34. Mark Kramer, “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Part
1): New Evidence from the Diary of Petro Shelest,” Cold War International History
Project Bulletin, issue 10 (March 1998); Mark Kramer, “The Prague Spring and the
Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: New Interpretations (second of two parts),” Cold
War International History Project Bulletin, issue 3 (Fall 1993).
35. Nelson P. Valdés, “What Was Forbidden Then Is Promoted Now: Cuba, the
Beatles and Historical Context,” Counterpunch, March 29/30, 2008.
36. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Analyzing Events in Czechoslovakia,” August 23,
1968, in Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 215.
37. Telephone interview with the authors, May 30, 2011.
38. Castro, “Speech Analyzing Events in Czechoslovakia,” 221.
39. Castro, “Speech Analyzing Events in Czechoslovakia,” 221.
40. Pavlov, Soviet–Cuban Alliance, 91–92.
Chapter 14
Internal Adjustments and

Advancing Equality, 1963–1975
In the House of the Americas I met Ramón, who is the “expert” on my

poetry, as they told me. To find an expert on my poetry was another of
my surprises in Cuba. Ramón was a young boy with an honest look and
a constant smile who worked for gangsters before the Revolution. He
told me, smiling, that he worked in the Sans Souci, one of the most cor-
rupt casinos. His job was to play cards with the customers: to play “for
the house.” He also worked in the Kennel Club, the dog-racing club, for
other gangsters. His job was to inject morphine into the dog that was not
supposed to win, or else to keep him thirsty and, just before the race,
give him lots of water to drink. . . . When he was sixteen the Revolution
triumphed. Ramón stopped working for the gangsters, left the casinos,
and began to study literature. He said: “Because that was what really
interested me.”
Once when we were going to the Varadero beach resort . . . we went
by the former Biltmore, which had been the district of the most elegant
mansions in Cuba and which is now called Siboney and is the district of
the scholarship students—where some fifty thousand farm boys live in
the mansions of the rich. Ramón, smiling, pointed out a huge building in
the distance and said: “That is the Kennel Club, where I used to inject the
dogs.” The Kennel Club, I was told, is now the stadium of the country
scholarship students. It was very moving to see the children of farmers and
laborers in the houses of millionaires. . . .
Farther along, where the Havana slums had been: beautiful pine groves
and ten-story apartment buildings behind those pine groves. Ramón told
me: “These are the families that used to live in the slums. Those ghettos
that used to exist around the cities no longer exist. The dirty water drains
used to go right through the middle of the houses. The houses were made
of cardboard and tin cans. People lived in the midst of filth. One of the first
170
Internal Adjustments and Advancing Equality, 1963–1975 171
tasks of the Revolution was to get rid of all that. It was done very soon; the
first houses built were for those people.”
—Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba
By 1963, the average rural worker’s diet had improved significantly in com-
parison to pre-Revolution days. All Cuban families with children younger than
seven could purchase one liter of milk per day for each child at a subsidized
price. Higher wages for most workers, decreased rents, and free public trans-
portation gave many people more disposable income, enabling them to buy
products previously available only to the middle and upper classes. But in-
creased demand quickly reduced the reserve stocks of these products, and soon
even ordinary items like toothpaste and soap were missing from store shelves.
The economy was suffering from two shocks. As the Cuban revolutionar-
ies implemented their plans, disaffected Cubans voted with their feet and left
Cuba. The first wave of émigrés, from 1959 to 1962, consisted largely of
landowners, wealthy businesspeople, officials in the Batista government and
army, employees of US corporations, small proprietors, and professionals—
doctors and nurses, skilled managers, architects, pharmacists, and engineers.1
Meanwhile, Cuba lost its principal market and supplier, the United States.
Once President Kennedy formally invoked the US embargo in 1962, its
draconian impact was felt by every Cuban. In contrast to trade sanctions the
United States had imposed on other countries until then, and unlike any sanc-
tions since, the embargo against Cuba even included all food and medicines.
Unable to buy machinery, chemicals, or spare parts from the United States,
Cuba was forced to let buses lie idle, electrical generators break down, and
many plans for development gather dust. Even the small chores of daily
life—washing clothes, repairing a tire, or preparing meals—became exhaust-
ing, time-consuming tasks. Trade with the Soviet Union provided some relief,
but it was far from sufficient to enable Cuba to remake its whole economy.
Economist Claes Brundenius explains that this “was the atmosphere when
the so-called great debate started in Cuba.”2 It lasted from 1963 to 1965, as
positions on material versus moral incentives, centralization versus decen-
tralization, and the use of market mechanisms to determine the price of basic
necessities were hashed out in newspapers, magazines, and meetings of mass
organizations. By the end, a tentative consensus emerged that Cuba could not
move to industrialization as quickly as leaders had envisioned initially, and
that for the time being the country’s development had to rest on agricultural
production. In part, this outcome was spurred on by a brief rise in the world
price of sugar in 1964, which held out the promise that increased sugar output
could provide for the economic diversification the leaders wanted.
172 Chapter 14
A PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR RURAL AREAS
Despite economic problems, the government proceeded with several major

reforms, many of which were rooted in a preferential treatment for rural
areas. In practice, this meant nonpreferential treatment for Havana, the coun-
try’s dominant urban center. Castro summarized the policy in 1966 by saying
that “we must promote a minimum of urbanization and a maximum of rural-
ism.”3 This commitment, which the July 26th Movement consistently had
articulated, served both idealistic and practical objectives. The highest levels
of poverty and inequality in Cuba occurred in rural areas. Both could be at-
tacked by improving the lives of rural workers. Rural areas along with what
was then the eastern province of Oriente also had a larger percentage of black
Cubans than Havana. As the government improved basic human services and
infrastructure, and created opportunities for meaningful work in rural areas,
it gave life to the promise of ending racism in law and practice. At the same
time, the government was able to reduce internal migration because rural
towns were becoming as attractive as the major cities had been.
The preferential policy resulted in the Cuban population being dispersed
in a way that departed significantly from the pattern common in Latin
America, where urban migration had begun to create megacities such as
São Paulo, which today are ringed by shantytowns with millions of people.4
Metropolitan Mexico City today has a population of more than twenty-one
million, five times that of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. In
contrast, from 1960 to 1980 Havana’s population increased only slightly,
from about 1.6 million to 1.9 million, though the country overall grew from
7 million to almost 10 million people. The city’s population today is about
2.1 million people.5
Holguín’s growth provides an example of the deliberate nature of the
government’s policy. Holguín had been a minor city in Oriente, thirty-five
miles from Cuba’s northeastern coast. As a result of the preferential policy,
it doubled in size to 187,000 people between 1960 and 1980, and today has
a population of nearly 300,000. The city became a provincial capital and a
manufacturing hub in accord with the plan to locate new factories closer to
natural resources and in parts of the country that had been previously under-
developed (see a Holguín factory in figure 14.1).6 Similarly, the government
developed provincial ports in order to reduce the country’s reliance on Ha-
vana for international trade. Holguín became one of the first cities in Cuba to
build a new university—the University of Holguín—which was founded in
1973 and today has 4,400 students.7
Attraction, not coercion, was the principal means the government used
to shape Cuba’s human geography. While the policy did include some legal
Cuba Doubles the Number of Provinces
In 1976, Cuba reorganized its administrative jurisdictions, dividing its six

provinces into fourteen provinces and 169 municipalities. The fabled Oriente
Province became five new provinces: Las Tunas, Holguín, Granma, Santiago
de Cuba, and Guantánamo. The Island of Youth (Isla de la Juventud) became
a “special” municipality. In 2010, the government made further adjustments,
reducing the number of municipalities to 167 and creating an additional prov-
ince. Starting in the west, the fifteen provinces are: Pinar del Río, Artemisa,
La Habana, Mayabeque, Matanzas, Villa Clara, Cienfuegos, Sancti Spíritus,
Ciego de Ávila, Camagüey, Las Tunas, Granma, Holguín, Santiago de Cuba,
and Guantánamo.
An elected provincial assembly governs each province and elects a provin-
cial committee, the president of which is the provincial governor. An elected
municipal assembly governs each municipality and chooses the mayor.
Map 14.1. Cuba’s Administrative Divisions
restrictions on a person’s free movement—through the use of work and resi-

dency permits—its essential character was humane. Many decisions would
not have passed muster if they were based solely on a cost-benefit analysis.
In addition to guaranteeing year-round employment to farmers, some of the
unemployment rampant in rural areas was absorbed by new construction—
roads, electric lines, and sewage disposal—and new social services. Stipends
provided to encourage people to attend school also removed some people
from the workforce. There were also agricultural experiments that officials
hoped would contribute to rural development.
For example, Fidel gave his elder brother, Ramón Castro Ruz, the task of
developing dairy cows that could survive in the tropics. While Cebú cattle
were best suited to the Cuban climate, a Cebú produces no more than six li-
ters of milk a day. Holsteins, in contrast, produce more than thirty liters daily.
Crossbreeding led to the development of an “H4 cow,” a hybrid that could
thrive in the tropical climate and produce twice as much milk as a Cebú.
174 Chapter 14
Figure 14.1. Toilet factory in Holguín that opened in 1979. Cuban officials in the 1970s
regarded their ability to produce light industry goods, which previously were imported,
as an important developmental advance. Photo by Philip Brenner.
ADJUSTING TO THE SOVIET SYSTEM
Ten-Million-Ton Sugar Harvest Fails

Between 1967 and 1970 the dream of true Cuban independence died two
deaths. First came the assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia. Che had in-
spired Cubans to believe that his magnetic persona and foco theory (the idea
that a small group could spark revolution in a country where the population
is downtrodden) could bring the third world into an alliance with Cuba. The
second came in 1970 with the failure of the ten-million-ton sugar harvest,
which sent an unmistakable message that Cuba would need to defer achieving
economic independence. Cuba’s leaders perceived that the Revolution’s only
chance of survival rested with the Soviet trading bloc.
Recall from the previous chapter that Fidel had promised in January 1968
that Cuba would be free from foreign dictates if it harvested ten million tons
of sugar in 1970. Journalist Richard Gott aptly characterized the plan as a
quixotic effort “to defeat the laws of nature and economics.”8 Neither Cuba
nor any other country had ever produced so much sugar in one year. The 1968
harvest had been only 3.7 million tons. Still, the “battle for sugar” captured
the public’s imagination and engaged a large portion of the population in a
chaotic, almost festive endeavor. Vacations were curtailed, land intended for
other crops was given over to sugar, factories reduced output as workers took
to the fields, and schools closed early. This meant that even if the ten-million-
ton goal had been reached, it would have been a pyrrhic victory. In the pro-
cess of trying to produce ten million tons of sugar, the country compromised
much of what it needed for future development. And Cuba harvested only 8.5
million metric tons of sugar in 1970.
On July 26, in front of hundreds of thousands of assembled Cubans, Castro
acknowledged the fault was his. “We are going to begin,” he declared, “by
pointing out the responsibility that all of us, and I in particular, have for these
problems.”9 Then, dramatically, he offered to resign his post as prime minister
(he also served as commander in chief of the armed forces and general sec-
retary of the PCC). “No,” a few hundred people shouted, in a rejoinder that
was not quite an affirmation of his leadership. “The people can replace us any
time they wish,” he said plaintively. The chants grew louder and louder: “Fi-
del, Fidel, Fidel.” He then consented to the crowd’s wishes and stayed on.10
Cuba Joins the Soviet Trading Bloc

Cuba expected no help from the United States or China. With only one option
left, Cuba accepted an offer to join the Council of Mutual Economic Assis-
tance (CMEA), a planned common market made up of the Soviet Union and
Eastern bloc countries. CMEA members had assigned responsibilities for the
production of particular commodities and industrialized products that would
be exchanged in an almost barter-like fashion with all the others. Cuba’s role
was predictably agricultural. It was designated as producer of sugar and citrus
for the trading group, with the tobacco crop as an auxiliary product.
The task of retooling the Cuban economy, so that it could use CMEA prod-
ucts, was vast. Consider the matter of spare parts for existing machinery, in-
cluding the famous 1940s and 1950s American automobiles of Havana. Spare
parts now had to come from Eastern Europe; screws, bolts, nails, and all im-
plements would be sized with metric calibrations. And the automobiles were
no longer Chevrolets and Fords, but Polish and Russian Fiats that were built
under the brand name Lada. For Cubans, the brand name became a common
joke, because Lada sounds much like the Spanish word lata, which means tin.
Indeed, Ladas were tinny and of low quality. Similarly, refrigerators and
washers produced in Eastern Europe were inferior to US products. Cubans
did not only feel they were receiving lower-quality goods. The upheaval
was cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive. They also realized that
176 Chapter 14
A Brief Respite
As Cuba’s integration into the CMEA was getting under way, sugar prices
began to rise dramatically. In 1974, the world market price of sugar rose to
$0.65 per pound. It had been about $0.04 per pound only four years earlier.*
Though Cuba was the world’s largest sugar producer, it had fixed price con-
tracts with the Soviet-bloc trading system that prevented it from selling most
of its output at the higher price. Still, the sixteen-fold jump in prices enabled
Cuba to buy higher-quality products from Western Europe, such as milking
machines, and to rev up one of its prize projects—a world-class pharma-
ceutical industry—by purchasing medical equipment from Nordic countries,
mostly Sweden. Cuba also was able to use the bounty of hard currency to buy
food and medicines from US corporations based in Latin America, because
in 1975 the Ford administration relaxed the embargo on sales to Cuba from
US subsidiaries in other countries. Cuba also bought US air conditioners from
Canada and Dodge and Ford taxis from Argentina. But the period of high sugar
revenues was short-lived. The price of sugar collapsed to less than ten cents
per pound within two years.
* Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization, revised edition
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 57.
refitting from a Western to a Soviet system meant that crossing back to a

higher standard in the future would be equally difficult, and would make
establishing economic independence from those countries less likely.
Did Dependency on the Soviet Union Replace Cuba’s Dependency

on the United States?
Cuba’s economy had been so closely tied to the United States before 1959
that the island lacked meaningful independence or sovereignty. The resulting
dependency had four components:
1. Trade: Cuba relied on the United States to purchase 75 percent of the
island’s exports and about the same percent of its imports came from its
northern neighbor.
2. Terms of trade: The income Cuba received for the commodities it sold to
the United States (mainly sugar) often did not cover the cost of the fin-
ished products and basic necessities it purchased from the United States,
which meant there was little available for development.
3. Loans: Without sufficient hard currency to import basic necessities,
Cuba relied on loans from the United States and Canada that had to be
repaid in hard currency. This further tied it to North America in a sub-

servient position.
4. Ownership: US companies owned or controlled a majority of Cuba’s basic
industries, railroads, communications, and banks. Using a variety of loop-
holes that they designed, they tended to pay far less in taxes than required
by law, which also made funds for development scarce.
This pattern of dependency was common between third world countries

and their former colonial rulers. Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley
described the dilemma his country faced in the early 1970s with respect to
sugar, its primary export. The sugar prices rarely went up, he wrote, but the
price of manufactured goods generally rose. As a result, he explained, “it
took more and more sugar to buy a tractor, a turbine or a motor car. How-
ever, the limits imposed by geography . . . make it impossible to produce
more and more sugar.”11
As a member of the CMEA, Cuba largely escaped the declining terms
of trade other poor countries suffered, because the cost of imports from the
Soviet bloc were based on long-term commitments, not market prices, which
also reflected a subsidy from the Soviet Union. In fact, the subsidies gave
Cuba a favorable balance of trade with the Soviet Union, which contrasted
with the unfavorable balance it had maintained with the United States.12
Moreover, the Soviets provided long-term loans to Cuba, many of which were
“forgiven” when Cuba could not repay them, and the Soviet Union did not
own any part of Cuba’s productive facilities.
In short, while Cuba’s trade with the Soviet bloc did limit its independence,
the dependent relationship with the Soviet bloc was less extensive and ex-
ploitative than its relationship with the United States had been. Membership
in the CMEA actually provided the revolutionary government with enough
resources to resume the pursuit of equity.
ADVANCING EQUALITY
Income and Benefits

On October 18, 1967, at a massive memorial service for Che Guevara, Fidel
Castro called on Cubans to emulate the fallen hero. To be a revolutionary,
he intoned, “we must say without any hesitation, ‘Be like Che’” (¡Que sean
como el Che!).13 The slogan became a standard that few, if any, Cubans could
emulate, but it conveyed a commitment to fight selflessly for equity and in-
dependence. In practice, Communist Party and government officials did live
in modest houses, sent their children to the same schools as ordinary workers,
178 Chapter 14
and relied on common doctors and hospitals available to anyone at no cost.

Echoing the slogan, the Cuban government in the 1960s and 1970s dedicated
itself to providing social services for everyone in the country, including a liv-
able old-age pension and guaranteed health care. The extreme poverty evident
during the Batista years disappeared.
Yet starting in the 1970s, a small degree of inequality was allowed with the
introduction of modest material incentives. Work centers received a limited
number of refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, or Ladas. On the ba-
sis of everyone’s job performance, which the workers themselves evaluated,
the best workers were permitted to purchase one of the items with a long-term
no-interest loan. New apartments were made available in the same manner.
Housing distribution, though, involved an additional element—“voluntary”
labor, called “microbrigades,” made up of about thirty people each from a
work center. Those in a microbrigade took leave from their regular employ-
ment to participate in construction full-time, and the work center received
40 percent of the units that its microbrigade built. In a sense, everyone in a
workplace participated, because the remaining employees made up for lost
productivity by putting in overtime. The construction workers were not nec-
essarily rewarded with an apartment.
New housing units were allotted by a democratic vote of all the workers.
In 1972 and 1973, the efforts of microbrigades generated 65 percent of all
new housing units produced in the country. Microbrigades were a way to
compensate for the shortage of skilled construction workers, and they used
prefabricated concrete slabs to build lifeless Soviet-designed units often more
appropriate for Moscow winters than the tropics.14
Alamar was the largest housing project constructed by microbrigades
(see photo in figure 14.2). Intended to house 120,000 residents, the proj-
ect included day care centers, sports facilities, polyclinics, and boarding
schools. Facing the sea just to the east of Havana, Alamar is located on land
that had been designated before 1959 for wealthy investors. Today, it houses
about 60,000 people.
Education
After the National Literacy Campaign, the government set a new goal be-
yond universal basic literacy—everyone should have at least a sixth-grade
education. Classrooms were created in factories so that laborers could
advance their education at lunch or after work. The government built new
universities so that there was at least one in every province on the island.
In the 1970s, it initiated an ambitious but controversial project based on
a utopian socialist vision of breaking down barriers between manual and
Figure 14.2. Children outside their school with Alamar apartment buildings in the
background. Photo by Philip Brenner.
intellectual labor—the secondary school in the countryside, la Escuela

Secundaria Básica en el Campo (ESBEC).15
ESBECs were boarding schools at which students would devote part of
their day to agricultural labor, learning how to cultivate, plant, and harvest
crops. They spent the other part of the day learning traditional secondary
school subjects. The program was intended to address several issues. One was
the long-standing urban denigration of campesinos and rural life. A second
was the shortage of agricultural workers. The government turned over much
of Cuba’s citrus production in the 1970s to these schools. Third, the schools
provided relief to families who were experiencing food shortages or tight
housing arrangements, and as a consequence, the schools also could improve
the health of Cuba’s next generation by giving students proper nutrition. In
addition, the schools attempted to give Cuban youth a sense of ownership in
the Revolution—that they and their families felt they were contributing to
society in a personal way.
A skeptic might view the ESBECs as an attempt to indoctrinate a new
generation of loyal communists and to undermine the centrality of families in
Cuban culture. But the Cuban government did not take young children forc-
ibly from their parents, as Operation Peter Pan claimed the revolutionaries
180 Chapter 14
Figure 14.3. Students at an ESBEC boarding school prepare to go home for the week-
end. Photo by Philip Brenner.
would do. Rather, a family’s decision to send an adolescent to an ESBEC was

voluntary; the schools began at grade seven, a point when children already
would have been imbued with family values, and students were provided with
free transportation to go home for the weekend (see ESBEC students getting
ready to travel home in figure 14.3).
Today, most of the boarding schools have been closed down as fewer
students have enrolled. Those still functioning are specialty schools in each
Cuban province—schools for aspiring athletes and others for gifted stu-
dents—called “vocational schools,” such as the prestigious Lenin School for
Exact Sciences in Havana’s suburbs, which requires a difficult entrance exam
and admits only the very top scorers.
In some ways, the ESBEC project mimicked the kind of education well-to-
do Cubans provided for their children before the Revolution by sending them
to boarding schools. Fidel and Raúl Castro’s father, for example, enrolled
them in the prestigious Belén Jesuit Preparatory School in Havana, hundreds
of miles from their home. However, given the ESBECs’ emphasis on manual
labor, a closer analogy is the education provided in early Israeli kibbutzim,
where children lived apart from the parents during the week. The ESBECs
and kibbutzim also shared a philosophical approach to education espoused
by John Dewey, an American educator who championed “experiential educa-
tion” as a basis for fully developing human potential.
Cuba’s advances in education from 1959 to 1980 are evident from several
indicators. The percentage of children 13–16 years of age enrolled in school
increased from about 6 to 82 percent. Per pupil spending in this period grew
from twelve pesos per student to one hundred thirty-seven pesos.16 In 1959,
there were only three universities in the country, all in provincial capitals. By
1980, there were thirty-nine. Day care centers for children as young as two
months old became available for a large proportion of the population. Today,
every Cuban family has access to free day care.
Health Care
Fidel Castro long displayed an idiosyncratic bias in favor of medical doc-
tors. Many of his confidants and top aides—such as Che Guevara—had been
formally trained as physicians. Even though training nurse practitioners and
physician’s assistants would have enabled Cuba to expand its capacity to
provide health care more quickly, the Cuban leader placed an emphasis on
educating doctors. Medical education was free, but students had to agree to
work in underserved, mainly rural, areas for the first three years after their
training. By 1974, the number of doctors per capita had returned roughly to
prerevolutionary levels, and they were distributed evenly throughout Cuba.
(By 2000, Cuba was ranked first in Latin America for doctors, nurses, and
hospital beds per capita.)17
The departure of so many medical professionals at the start of the Revolu-
tion might have produced a health care disaster. Thus, the improvement in
Cubans’ health during the first two decades after 1959 is all the more remark-
able. In emphasizing preventive medical practices, and charging Cubans
nothing for medical services or pharmaceuticals, the government raised the
level of health in the country by the end of the 1970s to that of an advanced
industrial country. At the same time, it built full-service polyclinics in rural
areas, increased the number of hospitals, and targeted several diseases for
immunization campaigns in addition to polio, mentioned in chapter 10. Rural-
urban disparities in health indicators were virtually eliminated. As a way to
encourage communities to engage in their own health improvement, polyclin-
ics had a democratic aspect similar to community health centers in the United
States. Each polyclinic was required to include community representatives on
its advisory board. Sociologist Julie Feinsilver explains that such participa-
tion creates “greater social cohesion and allows non-administrators and non-
health workers a voice in polyclinic operations.”18
ADVISORY DEMOCRACY
Popular Power
Community polyclinics were not the only institutions to embody a kind of
advisory democracy that Cuba championed in the 1970s. The ten-million-ton
182 Chapter 14
sugar fiasco convinced the leaders that a fundamental reorganization was

needed, which they promised would transfer power from the center to lo-
calities. The transfer involved three major political changes: the enlargement
of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) so that its membership reflected the
whole population, the creation of a new constitution framed by a Cuban con-
ception of socialist justice, and the establishment of a system of governance
that—at least on paper—decentralized political power and brought individual
Cubans into the decision-making process through elections.
A high-level commission of the PCC began work on the new constitution
in 1974. A draft was debated nationwide, in meetings of mass organizations
and in work centers. The debates resulted in some minor modifications, but
their real purpose was to give Cubans a sense of ownership over the docu-
ment.19 The PCC then held its first congress in 1975, ten years after the party
was formally created. It had grown from about 50,000 members in the late
1960s to 202,000, and there were many new faces at the congress, people in
their twenties and thirties who essentially had grown up under the revolution-
ary government. The PCC Congress placed its imprimatur on the new consti-
tution, which was approved by a national vote in February 1976.
The new constitution proclaimed that Cuba was a “socialist state.” First,
this meant that the major means of production were owned socially. Second,
it meant that Cuban law and institutions were to be guided by the goal of
egalitarianism. As legal scholar Debra Evenson explains, “Since egalitarian
values are at the core of Cuban socialism, the constitution also establishes
both equality of rights and duties for all citizens and prohibits discrimination
based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”20 In a bow to Soviet demands,
the constitution declared that the PCC is the “leading force” that “organizes
and guides the common effort toward . . . the construction of socialism.” But
the Communist Party had no legislative authority. That was granted to a new
National Assembly and its executive committee, the Council of State, which
sat at the pinnacle of the system of governance, dubbed Poder Popular or
People’s Power, that functioned from 1976 to 1992.
Castro began in 1970 to articulate a commitment to grassroots democracy
that entailed giving “the masses decision making power” over the “scores
of problems . . . in the cities and countryside.” This would mean substitut-
ing “democratic methods for the administrative methods that run the risk of
becoming bureaucratic methods.”21 Local affairs were better handled at the
ground level, not by dictates from Havana, he said, and local councils could
lead people “to take an interest in the problems of production, absenteeism,
amount and quality of the product.”22 But as political scientist Carollee Ben-
gelsdorf observes, the goals of participatory democracy and decentralization
contradicted the aim of “ending the wasteful aspects of the social and political
chaos of the 1960s.” To infuse programs with greater rationality, the leaders
believed, would require “control from the center.”23
Poder Popular attempted to resolve the contradiction between decentral-
ized participation and centralized control by creating a system of indirect
democracy. But a 1992 law gave citizens greater direct voice in choosing their
representatives at all three levels of government.24 At the first level, called
circunscripciones, Cubans elect representatives to municipal councils. Each
circunscripción has about two thousand residents. Nominations come from
neighborhood meetings organized by the CDRs, not from a PCC-determined
slate, and are open to anyone, whether or not a person is a member of the
PCC. Municipal council members maintain their normal full-time jobs, serv-
ing as citizen-legislators. Citizens can vote starting at the age of sixteen.
The members of provincial assemblies and the National Assembly are
also chosen by direct election, though an official Nominations Commission
creates the slate of candidates. The commissions at each level are made up
of representatives from mass organizations at that level. For example, the
members of the provincial nominations commission for Pinar del Rio are
representatives from the provincial councils of the Center of Cuban Work-
ers (CTC), Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), Fed-
eration of Cuban Women (FMC), Association of Small Farmers (ANAP),
Federation of University Students (FEU), and the Federation of Middle
School Students (FEEM).
Until now, only members of the PCC or Communist Youth (UJC) have
been chosen to serve in the National Assembly, which has 614 members
and is mandated to have one deputy for every twenty thousand citizens in a
district. It meets twice a year for a few days each time. When it is not in ses-
sion, the Council of State—which the Assembly elects—exercises legislative
power. The National Assembly also elects the country’s president, who serves
as head of both the Council of State and Council of Ministers, the executive
branch’s coordinating body.
In practice, Poder Popular failed to reconcile the prerogatives of decen-
tralized power with the need to increase efficiency in the production and
distribution of goods. Local councils were granted the right to make decisions
about only a few issues, and they had limited resources at their command to
institute significant innovations. Moreover, the PCC essentially determined
who could be elected to the National Assembly. Remarkably, local elections
were actively contested for many years, and neighborhood meetings did en-
gage the citizenry. While it seemed Cubans tended to view popular power as
a useless exercise by the 1990s, the greater freedom of expression and debate
for twenty years produced a new kind of interest expressed in voters leaving
ballots partially blank.25
184 Chapter 14
Family Code
While the Cuban Revolution aspired to make the nuclear family “the basic
unit” of society, Debra Evenson observes, it added a twist that reflected egali-
tarian goals.26 These were embodied in the 1975 Family Code, a visionary law
whose enactment was spearheaded by Vilma Espín and the Federation of Cu-
ban Women. Under the Family Code, spouses had “absolute equality”—both
partners were given equal property rights, and both had the same obligations
to care for the home and children. One partner, for example, was permitted to
initiate divorce proceedings if the other did not participate equally in cleaning
the house. This orientation was a marked contrast to Cuba’s pre-revolutionary
Civil Code, which decreed that a married woman was obligated to obey her
husband, who was the partner solely in control of marital property.27
Another provision eliminated discrimination that had existed in earlier
laws against some children. Under the Family Code, all children were consid-
ered to have the same rights, whether they were born to married or unmarried
parents or were adopted. One notable provision of the Family Code, which
many countries even today have not yet adopted, recognized informal mar-
riages as having the same rights and obligations as formal marriages estab-
lished by a legal authority. The Code defined informal marriages as a “union
between a man and a woman who are legally fit to establish it and which is
in keeping with the standards of stability and singularity.”28 The basic tenet
was a carryover from the 1940 constitution, but Cuban courts generally had
applied it only with respect to inheritance.29
The Family Code did not recognize unions between same-sex partners,
and Cuban law today still does not provide for gay marriages. Moreover,
changes in Cuba’s patriarchal culture cannot be attributed exclusively to the
Family Code. Though women did gain greater equality in the workplace,
most continued to bear the brunt of housework and child care when they ar-
rived home. But the Code set an aspirational norm for society. As the Center
for Democracy in the Americas observed in a 2013 report, the Family Code
created a “foundation for policies that . . . brought Cuban girls into the class-
room, tripled the number of Cuban women at work and provide[d] Cuban
women with rights and opportunities that are rare in the developing world.”30
The 1976 constitution included the rights that the Family Code had es-
tablished. Laws immediately flowing from the constitution included guar-
antees of equal rights for women to health care and social security and job
protections such as maternal leave. The government also significantly in-
creased the availability of free children’s day care, which provided women
with an essential service that enabled them to work. By 1985, the number
of day care centers had doubled in comparison to 1976 and was six times
greater than in the mid-1960s.31
A DARK DECADE
Despite Cuba’s significant educational achievements in the first decade

after the Revolution, there were troubling signs of problems. Dropout rates
were high, many schools lacked up-to-date textbooks, and teacher training
seemed inadequate. In April 1971, the government held the First National
Congress of Education and Culture, ostensibly as a response to the prob-
lems. Indeed, the delegates put forth more than two thousand proposals for
educational reform. But Fidel signaled that the conclave was about more
than failing schools. His speech took aim at “bourgeois liberals” who are
“at war with us,” who show no understanding of the underdevelopment
Cuba was trying to overcome as a result of the “centuries of plunder”
the patrons of these “agents of cultural imperialism” brought to bear on
countries like Cuba.32 The congress then declared that all trends “based on
apparent ideas of freedom as a disguise . . . for works that conspire against
the revolutionary ideology” are “damnable.”33 This “ushered in a period of
profound dogma”—a dark decade of artistic repression known as the “gray
years”—that pushed many artists and writers into exile.34
It remains unclear why the government tightened its grip on writers and
artists in 1971. But recall that the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive coincided
with official criticism of the global counterculture because it supposedly
encouraged hedonism and individualism. The 1971 crackdown may have
emerged from this root. Possibly the leaders feared dissent, because the eco-
nomic difficulties were beginning to challenge Cubans’ faith in the viability
of the Revolution. Leaders sought unity as a way to prevent the further ero-
sion of hope.
The circumstance that sparked Fidel’s denunciations was the response
by major writers around the globe—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes—to the
incarceration of Héberto Padilla in March 1971.35 Padilla was an internation-
ally respected avant-garde poet whom the government had sent abroad when
it shut down Lunes. After he returned in 1967, his writing became increas-
ingly hostile to the Revolution. In his 1968 prize-winning collection of po-
ems, Outside the Game (Fuera del Fuego), he emphatically proclaimed that
artists had to be nonconformists, independent of politics.
During Padilla’s five-week detention in the basement of a former Catho-
lic boys’ school, more than twenty writers signed a letter to Le Monde that
denounced the Cuban government’s action and called for his release. When
Padilla was released on April 27, he did not go quietly. In a “confessional”
speech, which he fashioned to seem as if he had written it under duress,
Padilla thanked his Ministry of Interior jailors for being “more intelligent”
186 Chapter 14
than he was, and for helping him appreciate how he had sinned by publish-
ing his self-centered poetry.
Padilla had a well-known penchant for sarcasm and satire. But government
officials missed the joke, believed he was sincere, and took him at his word,
which included damning condemnations of his fiancée, Belkis Cuza Malé,
and his closest friend, Pablo Armando Fernández. Almost instantaneously,
they were placed on a blacklist that prevented them from publishing their
writing. Pablo Armando described to us his humiliation when writers crossed
the street to avoid making contact with him. He had become a pariah. Pa-
dilla and Cuza Malé left Cuba before the end of the decade. Pablo Armando
stayed, and ultimately was honored as “poet laureate.”
NOTES
1. Silvia Pedraza, Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78–79.
2. Claes Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba: The Challenge of Economic Growth
with Equity (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), 51.
3. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso al Encontrarse con los Integrantes de la Marcha
al Segundo Frente ‘Frank Pais,’” Septiembre 26, 1966, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/
4. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 151–53.
5. Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Informació, Anuario Estadistíco de Cuba
2013, Edición 2014, POBLACIÓN/POPULATION, tables 3.1 and 3.10, http://www
.one.cu/aec2013/esp/03_tabla_cuadro.htm.
6. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 154.
7. “¿Quiénes Somos?” Universidad de Holguín, http://www.uho.edu.cu/?page_
id=526.
8. Gott, Cuba, 240.
9. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech,” July 26, 1970, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/dis
cursos/1970/esp/f260770e.html.
11. Michael Manley, The Politics of Change: A Jamaican Testament (London:
André Deutsch, 1974), 79.
12. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two Decade Ap-
praisal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 184.
13. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso Pronunciado en Memoria del Comandante Er-
nesto Che Guevara, en la Plaza de la Revolucion,” October 18, 1967; translation by
the authors, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1967/esp/f181067e.html.
14. Gary Fields, “Economic Development and Housing Policy in Cuba,” Berkeley
Planning Journal 2, no. 1 (1985): 73; Eckstein, Back to the Future, 158–59.
15. Leiner, “Two Decades of Educational Change in Cuba,” 208–9.
16. Leiner, “Two Decades of Educational Change in Cuba,” 205.
17. Eckstein, Back from the Future, table 5.1, 250.

18. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 81.
19. Debra Evenson, Revolution in the Balance: Law and Society in Contemporary
Cuba (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 21.
20. Evenson, Revolution in the Balance, 22.
21. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the
Federation of Cuban Women,” August 23, 1970, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/dis
cursos/1970/esp/f230870e.html.
22. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of the
Founding of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution,” September 5, 1970,
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1970/esp/f280970e.html.
23. Carollee Bengelsdorf, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba: Between Vision
and Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 107.
24. Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular de Cuba, Ley No. 72, “Ley Electoral,”
La Gaceta Oficial Extraordinaria, no. 9, November 2, 1992, 52, 57–59, https://www
.gacetaoficial.gob.cu/codbuscar.php.
25. Bengelsdorf, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba, 113–18; Jorge I. Domín-
guez, “Re-Imagining Cuba’s National Assembly,” Cuban Counterpoints, July 27,
2015, http://cubacounterpoints.com/archives/1697.
28. Executive Branch of Council of Ministers, “Cuban Family Code” (New York:
Center for Cuban Studies, 1975), 6.
29. Max Azicri, “The Cuban Family Code: Some Observations on Its Innovations
and Continuities,” Review of Socialist Law 6 (1980): 186.
30. Sarah Stephens, “Women’s Work: Gender Equality in Cuba and the Role of
Women in Building Cuba’s Future” (Washington, DC: Center for Democracy in the
Americas, 2013), 32.
31. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 43.
32. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en la Clausura del Primer Congreso Nacional de
educacion y Cultura,” April 30, 1971, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1971/
esp/f300471e.html.
33. As quoted in Domínguez, Cuba, 393–94.
34. Leonardo Padura Fuentes, “Living and Creating in Cuba: Risks and Chal-
lenges,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip
Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 348.
35. Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resis-
tance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 353–57;
Gott, Cuba, 246–48.
Chapter 15
Becoming a Third World Leader, 1970s
On 5 November [1975], at a large and calm meeting, the leadership of the

Communist Party of Cuba reached its decision without wavering. Contrary
to numerous assertions, it was a sovereign and independent act by Cuba; the
Soviet Union was informed not before, but after the decision had been made.
On another such 5 November, in 1843, a slave called Black Carlota, work-
ing on the Triunvirato plantation in the Matanzas region, had taken up her
machete at the head of a slave rebellion in which she lost her life. It was in
homage to her that the solidarity action in Angola bore her name: Operation
Carlota. Operation Carlota began with the dispatch over a period of thirteen
days of a 650-man battalion, strengthened by special troops. They were
transported to Luanda airport itself, then still occupied by the Portuguese.
. . . But there can be no doubt that the immense majority left for Angola filled
with the conviction that they were performing an act of political solidarity,
and with the same consciousness and bravery that marked the rout of the
Bay of Pigs landing fifteen years earlier. That is why Operation Carlota was
not a simple expedition by professional soldiers, but a genuine people’s war.
—Gabriel García Márquez, “Operation Carlotta”1
Cuban leaders viewed the world differently at the beginning of the 1970s than
they had just five years earlier. Détente between the Soviet Union and the
United States reduced Cold War tensions, which provided space for Cuba to
pursue an opening with the United States. In the Western Hemisphere, new
possibilities emerged for constructive state-to-state relations in Chile, Peru,
Jamaica, and Guyana. The growth of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)
enhanced the organization’s viability as an agency that could empower poorer
countries. Yet these changes in the global environment coincided with Cuba’s
new Soviet bloc relationship, which constrained the impulse of Cuba’s lead-
ers to support third world insurgencies.
188
Becoming a Third World Leader, 1970s 189
OPENING TO THE UNITED STATES
Even though President Richard Nixon signed a strategic arms control treaty
with the Soviet Union and opened talks with Communist China, he resolutely
rejected proposals to reduce tension with Cuba at the start of his first term.
But necessity intervened to overcome dogmatism as US officials sought to
end a wave of airline hijackings, many of which landed in Cuba.
Cuba also had an interest in discouraging air piracy. In September 1969,
the government announced that it would prosecute or extradite hijackers, but
that extradition would occur only to countries with which it had an anti-hi-
jacking agreement. Cuba’s policy led to negotiations with the United States in
November 1972, facilitated by Swiss diplomats in Havana. In February 1973,
the two governments signed a reciprocal “memorandum of understanding”
against hijacking that included boats.2 Secretary of State William P. Rogers,
though, emphasized that the accord did not “foreshadow a change of policies”
toward Cuba overall.3
Rogers’s statement did not deter some House members and senators from
pursuing a policy change. The moderate Republican Wednesday Group in
the House had just issued a report that called for an end to the US embargo
against Cuba.4 (The report’s author was Bill Richardson, a young staffer who
went on to become a Democratic representative from New Mexico, governor
of New Mexico, US ambassador to the UN, and secretary of energy.) In the
Senate, the chair of a Foreign Relations subcommittee—Senator Gale Mc-
Gee (D-WY), an outspoken anti-communist and hawk on Vietnam—began
a set of hearings on US-Cuba relations in March 1973 with a clear warning
to the executive branch: “Judging from statements that any number of my
colleagues have been making in the Congressional Record lately,” he said,
“perhaps the time is ripe, maybe a little late, for a reexamination of what our
Cuba policy both is and perhaps should be.”5 Indeed, in September 1973,
when Henry Kissinger became secretary of state and was forced to take Con-
gress into consideration in ways he had not while he was national security
adviser, he worried that the legislature might preempt the executive in trying
to change US policy.6
In June 1974, as President Nixon was beginning to lose his grip on power
due to the Watergate investigation, Kissinger appointed William D. Rogers as
assistant secretary of state for Latin America. A prominent lawyer and Demo-
crat, Rogers was a member of the Commission on United States-Latin Ameri-
can Relations (commonly known as the Linowitz Commission, after its chair,
former US ambassador to the OAS Sol M. Linowitz). The commission’s 1974
report urged “that the United States act now to end the trade embargo” in order
to achieve “a normal relationship with Cuba.”7 In July 1974, Kissinger initiated
190 Chapter 15
secret talks with Cuba, and six months later sent two emissaries (Lawrence
Eagleburger and Frank Mankiewicz) to meetings with two Cuban represen-
tatives (Ramón Sánchez-Parodi and Néstor García) in a coffee shop at New
York’s LaGuardia Airport. The talks were a closely held secret; even President
Gerald Ford was given only limited details.8
Meanwhile, Congress continued to move on Cuba policy. In September
1974, two senior senators—Republican Jacob Javits of New York and Demo-
crat Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island—met with Fidel Castro in Havana. The
first elected US officials to go to Cuba since 1960, the two senators reported
that the Cuban leader appeared open to negotiations and concluded that “the
time is ripe for beginning the process of normalization.”9 In 1975, Republican
Representative Charles Whalen (OH) traveled to Cuba, as did Democratic
Senators George McGovern and James Abourezk (SD). At the same time, a
House subcommittee on trade held televised hearings on ending the embargo,
as a way to foster a more favorable public attitude toward a new policy.10
As a signal of its intention to move the process forward, the United States
supported an OAS resolution in the summer of 1975, declaring that all coun-
tries in the hemisphere had the right to conduct relations with Cuba in any
“form that each State deems desirable.”11 The measure was tantamount to
ending the 1964 hemisphere-wide embargo. President Ford then significantly
relaxed the US embargo so that subsidiaries of US corporations in third coun-
tries could trade with Cuba. The measure had two goals: to place the United
States in compliance with the OAS resolution and to satisfy US companies
that wanted to sell to Cuba via their foreign subsidiaries. In particular, Ford
and Chrysler wanted to sell their Argentine-made cars to Cuba and were pres-
suring the administration for authorization.
But at almost the very moment that the United States eased the embargo,
Cuba introduced a resolution in the UN Committee on Colonialism calling for
the independence of Puerto Rico, even though US officials had warned Cuban
emissaries with whom they had been meeting that the Cuban resolution could
dismantle the nascent rapprochement.12 Three months later, in November
1975, Cuba sent troops to Angola to support the People’s Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government there. Kissinger saw the Cuban
move as a direct assault on US-Soviet détente and a slap in the face after his
moves to end the embargo. In December 1975, Ford announced that Cuba’s
Angola operation “destroys any opportunity for improvement of relations
with the United States.”13
Despite the hostile US public posture toward Cuba, secret talks did con-
tinue early in 1976.14 But these were soon overwhelmed, in an election year,
by right-wing pressure on President Ford to harden his stance against Cuba.
Kissinger’s Two Views about Cuba in Angola
Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger was perplexed. Why would Castro
send troops to Angola in November 1975, he asked, when he was making
progress on normalizing relations with the United States? Three months earlier,
he noted, the United States had essentially lifted the embargo by allowing US
subsidiaries in third countries to trade with Cuba.
Kissinger was talking to a small group of scholars—including Philip
Brenner—at the palatial Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, in
1993.* The academics offered several possible explanations for Castro’s behav-
ior, and one in particular struck Kissinger as the most likely. Castro must have
assessed, Kissinger agreed, that he could get no more concessions from the
Ford administration than those he had obtained already. Further, Castro may
have assumed that the war in Angola would be over by the beginning of 1977,
and that he could resume the dialogue with a new presidential administration.
Yet in his 1999 memoir, Kissinger argued that Castro sent troops to Angola
“because he considered a normal relationship with the United States incom-
patible with his self-appointed role as leader of the revolutionary struggle.”
He added that “Castro needed the United States as an enemy to justify his
totalitarian grip on the country and to maintain military support from the
Soviet Union.”†
* A report of the meeting is provided in Peter Kornbluh and James G. Blight, “Dialogue with Cas-
tro: A Hidden History,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994.
† Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 785, 786.
Then, in October 1976, terrorists linked to the United States blew up Cubana
Airlines flight 455 off the coast of Barbados.15 The explosion killed all 73
people aboard the Cuban civilian airliner, including the two dozen members
of Cuba’s Olympic fencing team. Cubans reacted with an outpouring of grief
at a mass funeral, at which Castro announced he was suspending the 1973
hijacking accord and charged that the CIA was ultimately responsible for the
terrorist bombing.
In fact, the US intelligence community had learned of a possible terrorist
attack against a Cuban airliner and did not notify Cuban officials. Luis Posada
Carriles, one of the bomb plotters, worked for the US Central Intelligence
Agency in the 1960s as a demolitions trainer, and remained in contact with
operatives in Latin America. A Venezuelan prosecutor had indicted Posada
Carriles for planning the Cubana bombing, but he “escaped” in 1985 from
prison (led out the front door by the warden) and turned up in El Salvador.
There he served as chief of the contra supply operation, transporting weapons
for the US covert war against Nicaragua.16
192 Chapter 15
CUBA IN AFRICA
While Kissinger, and much of Washington’s elite, believed that Cuba “was
operating as a Soviet surrogate” in Angola, Cuba actually was acting contrary
to Soviet wishes.17 Soviet leaders worried that a Cuban military intervention
in Africa would undermine their efforts to reduce tension and increase trade
with the United States. Indeed, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev “flatly re-
fused to transport the Cuban troops or to send Soviet officers to serve with
the Cubans in Angola.”18 And so the Cubans did not inform the Soviets when
they sent the first combat soldiers to Angola in November 1975, even though
some were transported in Soviet planes (figure 15.1 shows Cuban troops en
route to battle in Angola).19
Cuba had begun its involvement in Africa more than a decade earlier, when
it provided medical assistance to Algerian rebels in January 1962, as histo-
rian Piero Gleijeses details in the first of his masterful two-volume study of
Cuba’s Africa policy, Conflicting Missions. Cuba’s commitment to African
anti-colonial struggles then continued in 1964 and 1965, when it sent troops
to Zaire and began supporting independence fighters against the Portuguese
in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola.20
It was no surprise, then, that the MPLA sought Cuba’s help in the civil
war that broke out in Angola after a new Portuguese government announced
in 1974 that it would be granting independence to its African colonies. Two
other groups challenged the MPLA’s claim to rule the country. The National
Figure 15.1. Cuban troops and weapons supported the MPLA in 1975. Photo by Ar-
naldo Santos, courtesy of Granma.
Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) was supported largely by the
United States, and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola
(UNITA) received support from the United States, the People’s Republic
of China, and later from South Africa. The MPLA’s call to Cuba became
urgent in mid-1975, when South African troops entered Angola essentially
to help UNITA.
US policymakers and black African leaders viewed the battle for Angola in
a strikingly similar way. They understood that the outcome could destabilize
the South African apartheid regime. The South African government feared
that an MPLA-ruled Angola would likely become a safe haven for fighters of
the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO), who were struggling
for the independence of Namibia, which was then called Southwest Africa.
South Africa had been defying a UN demand to give up control over Namibia,
believing that once independent, it would become a safe haven for African
National Congress (ANC) insurgents who sought to overthrow South Africa’s
white minority-ruled government. In effect, there was a shared view that the
result of the Angolan conflict could have a domino effect, leading to the end
of the apartheid regime.
Though many US officials may have preferred a more virtuous ally than
South Africa, the regime had the singular “virtue” of being decidedly anti-
Soviet. On the other hand, some of the ANC and SWAPO leaders seemed to
be sympathetic toward the Soviet Union. From the US perspective, Cuba had
entered a major battle on the “wrong” side in a region that the United States
perceived was a vital location in its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.
By mid-1976, there were more than 30,000 Cuban troops in Angola.
Meanwhile, Castro also had been cultivating positive working relationships
with the leaders of other newly independent African states, such as Julius
Nyerere, president of Tanzania, and Ahmed Sékou Touré of the Republic of
Guinea. Cuban support for anti-colonial movements and newly independent
governments raised its international standing significantly. In particular, its
armed support against South Africa led the NAM to select Cuba as the site
for its 1979 summit.
Cuban troops had enabled the MPLA to secure control of much of the
country, and in early 1977, Havana announced it would be withdrawing its
forces from the region. This provided newly inaugurated President Jimmy
Carter with the opportunity to follow his inclinations and endorse the recom-
mendations of the Linowitz Commission regarding Cuba.21 On March 15,
1977, Carter signed Presidential Directive/NSC-6, which stipulated that the
United States “should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with
Cuba.”22 This followed on the heels of a State Department announcement
that the president would not renew the ban on travel to Cuba by US citizens.
194 Chapter 15
Notably, Carter’s principal Latin America specialist on the NSC staff,

Robert Pastor, had been executive director of the Linowitz Commission, and
he may have been influential in shaping Carter’s initial views about Cuba.
For example, in a memo to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Pastor urged “that we try to use a different term to refer to the Cubans other
than ‘Soviet puppet.’” He argued that “puppet” suggests that the Soviet Union
was controlling what Cuba did, which, he explained, “is not the case.”23
Dismissing the threat Cuba posed to US interests in southern Africa, another
prominent Carter adviser, UN ambassador-designate Andrew Young, asserted
that Cuban troops brought “a certain stability and order.”24
These decisions altered the rationale for the US embargo, which had been
premised on the alleged threat that Cuba posed to the United States. Instead,
the sanctions were justified as a bargaining chip in an attempt to improve
human rights in Cuba, to discourage Cuba’s foreign intervention, and to gain
compensation for expropriated property.
For his part, Fidel sent positive signals about engaging diplomatically with
the Carter administration. In January 1977, Cuba proposed negotiations with
the United States over fishing boundaries. On February 8, in an interview
broadcast on CBS, the Cuban leader said “he believes President Carter is a
man with a ‘sense of morals’ who may bring an end to 16 years of hostility
between the United States and Cuba.”25
Carter also approved negotiations with Cuba over maritime boundaries and
fishing rights and an agreement was finalized in April 1977. In September,
the two countries expanded the opportunities for diplomatic engagement by
reopening their old embassy buildings as “interests sections” and staffing the
offices with Cuban and US diplomats, respectively. (When two countries do
not have diplomatic relations, a third country typically handles the interests of
the other two in its own embassy. Such interests, for example, might be help-
ing a traveler to recover a lost passport. From 1961 to 1977, Czechoslovakia
had an office for Cuban interests in Washington, and Switzerland had one for
US interests in Havana.)
However, Brzezinski did not think US-Cuban relations should be isolated
from the US-Soviet rivalry, and he relentlessly urged the president to inter-
pret Cuban behavior in that context. Carter later acknowledged the influence
Brzezinski had on his thinking. “I was an eager student,” he wrote, “and took
full advantage of what Brzezinski had to offer. As a college professor and
author, he was able to express complicated ideas simply.”26
The national security adviser also used the media to press his point of view.
For example, State Department officials were surprised in November 1977 to
find the New York Times featuring a major front-page story that suggested Cu-
ban troops had been deployed throughout Africa as a stalking horse for Soviet
advancement on the continent.27 Insiders immediately guessed, correctly, that

the leak of this top-secret analysis came from Brzezinski. And a close look at
the map revealed that in several instances the Cuban deployment was merely
a handful of security advisers, technicians, or medical personnel.
As Brzezinski and the State Department waged their internal struggle to
shape Carter’s worldview, Cuba’s decision to send troops to Ethiopia tilted
the balance in the national security adviser’s favor. The United States had
supported the Ethiopian government under the long rule of Emperor Haile Se-
lassie, who was deposed in a September 1974 coup. When General Mengistu
Haile Mariam, the leader of the military junta that took over, consolidated
his power in 1977, he declared Ethiopia to be a socialist state and asked the
United States to leave. At the time, Ethiopia was engaged in two wars, one
with neighboring Somalia over disputed territory in the Ogaden Desert, and
the other with Eritrean secessionists trying to separate their province from
Ethiopia. Cuba had provided some support for the Eritreans when they were
fighting against Selassie and the Soviet Union had been backing Somalia.
In response to Mengistu’s moves, the Soviet Union shifted its support from
Somalia to Ethiopia and asked Cuba to divert 20,000 troops from Angola to
Ethiopia. Castro initially attempted to mediate a ceasefire between the two
countries. But when that effort failed, he complied with the Soviet request.
The Ethiopia case seems quite different from Angola, and scholars have
not yet been able to explain adequately Cuba’s motives for sending troops to
the Horn of Africa. Mengistu already had become a brutal, corrupt dictator
who was doing little to improve the lives of Ethiopians and was not widely
respected in Africa. The conflict with Somalia did not threaten the regime’s
viability and focused on a section of desert land that held no mineral wealth.
While Cuba refused to support Ethiopian military actions against Eritrean
separatists, they in effect provided indirect support by freeing up several
Ethiopian divisions. Cuba’s decision, thus, seems based on a response to
Soviet pressure, because the action did not clearly serve Cuban interests and
was inconsistent with Cuba’s general practice.
In his memoir, Brzezinski expressed no doubt that the Soviet Union was
using Cuba as a “military proxy” in Ethiopia.28 As the president adopted
Brzezinski’s worldview, he repeatedly painted himself into rhetorical cor-
ners. He responded to each new Cuban “challenge” with a tough stance,
even when the reality turned out to contradict the allegations.29 Wayne Smith,
who was in charge of the State Department’s Cuba desk at the time, recalled
Cuba made sincere efforts to be cooperative in 1978 and 1979. But the White
House rebuffed those efforts. When Smith tried to provide the president with
a “balanced assessment” of Cuba’s role in Africa, noting that Cuba had “con-
tributed to peaceful solutions and had been helpful to us,” a National Security
196 Chapter 15
Council aide informed him that the NSC was interested only in emphasizing
how “the Soviets and the Cubans are the aggressors.”30
CUBA’S NEW LEADERSHIP ROLE
Cuba’s shifting role in international relations also was evident in the Western
Hemisphere. A 1975 Defense Intelligence Agency report stated that “Cuba
is virtually inactive in subversive support in Latin America at this time.”31
After Che Guevara’s death, Cuba had reduced its support for insurgencies
there and sought cooperative state-to-state relationships with governments
less inclined to follow a pro-US line. Salvador Allende, the president of
Chile from 1970 until his death during a right-wing coup in 1973, provided
the first major opening for Cuba when he restored diplomatic relations on
his first day in office. Cuba had already established friendly contacts with
the leftist military government of Peru. In 1974, when Argentina’s populist
leader Juan Domingo Perón returned to Buenos Aires from exile in Spain,
Cuba created ties there.
As the hemisphere turned left in the 1970s, Cuba offered technical and
development assistance to established governments, especially in the Carib-
bean basin. Large contingents of Cuban teachers and doctors went to Jamaica
starting in 1974. After Maurice Bishop’s New Jewel Movement overthrew
the government of Grenada in 1979, Cuban engineers helped to construct
a modern airport to stimulate the island’s tourist trade. (Though President
Ronald Reagan charged that the airport was intended as a refueling station
for Soviet bombers, it had been designed by the US Agency for International
Development prior to the coup.) In Nicaragua, Cuba provided some training
to the Sandinista rebels, but did not send arms until they ousted the coun-
try’s dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in 1979. Cuba then contributed significant
development and military aid, including weapons and training, to the new
Sandinista government. But Castro also advised the Sandinistas to take a
measured approach in consolidating their revolution in order to avoid anger-
ing the United States. While the Reagan administration charged that Cuba
was arming El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, State
Department officials had convincing evidence that the vast majority of rebel
arms in El Salvador came from seized government weapons caches or were
obtained via the black market within El Salvador.
Meanwhile, Castro developed a working relationship with General Omar
Torrijos, the military leader of Panama, and his intelligence chief, Colonel
Manuel Antonio Noriega. Panama had allowed Cuba to set up several front
companies that were used to circumvent the US embargo. But the relationship
became complex because Torrijos and Noriega had close relations with US of-
ficials. Noriega, for example, served as an intermediary between Fidel Castro
and the Reagan administration to defuse tensions in the aftermath of the 1983
US invasion of Grenada.32
Cuba, all the while, was establishing its role as a leader of the Non-Aligned
Movement. In 1973, the NAM first called for the creation of a “New World
Economic Order” in which developing countries would use their “commodity
power” (control of oil and strategic minerals) and market potential to obtain
more favorable terms of trade. Castro envisioned Arab oil-producing coun-
tries as a key component in the plan to develop a South-South trading alliance
that could challenge Northern domination and make commodity power mean-
ingful. In part for this reason, Cuba broke diplomatic relations with Israel in
1973 and sent military advisers to Syria during the Arab-Israeli War that year.
In 1974, Castro invited to Havana Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Liberation
Organization’s leader, and the next year Cuba supported a majority of the UN
General Assembly in declaring that Zionism was a form of racism.
Ninety-six nations sent their heads of state to the September 1979 NAM
summit in Havana (see a photo of the summit in figure 15.2). Along with
their foreign ministers and other members of their delegations, they con-
vened in a spanking new, modern convention center with telecommunica-
tions facilities for the 1,200 journalists covering the conference. But attend-
ees were jarred just prior to the opening by US charges that the Soviet Union
had secretly dispatched a “combat brigade” to Cuba. In fact, the “discovery”
turned out to be misinterpreted intelligence—the 3,000-soldier unit had been
Figure 15.2. The sixth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement met in Havana in 1979.
Photo by Philip Brenner.
198 Chapter 15
in place, with US acquiescence, since the 1962 missile crisis. But Carter in-
sisted it had to be removed because it could be used for military intervention
in the Western Hemisphere. In October 1979, he created the Caribbean Con-
tingency Joint Task Force in Key West in order to protect the region from
the threat posed by the brigade. He also signed Presidential Directive 52,
which declared that US policy was “to contain Cuba as a source of violent
revolutionary change,” and he ordered national security agencies to devise
strategies for “isolating” Cuba.33
The summit gave Cuba a mandate to develop a long-range agenda for
South-South relations. Yet Cuba’s leadership role was significantly compro-
mised less than four months later when the Soviet Union invaded Afghani-
stan. Afghanistan was a member of the NAM and the inviolability of each
member’s sovereignty was a core NAM principle. The Soviet leaders had not
even informed Fidel in advance about the intervention. But he felt constrained
to support the Soviet action by not condemning it, which was a position
exactly opposite to the one that NAM countries expected their chair to take.
As in 1968, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, Cuba’s
“benefactor” had placed the revolutionary government in a no-win situation.
With advance notice, Fidel might have been able to find an acceptable com-
promise. But faced with the fait accompli of the invasion, he chose the op-
tion of not siding with the NAM and vitiating Cuba’s potential to strengthen
the organization and its members’ bargaining power because it seemed less
costly. In hindsight, the cost proved to be greater than in 1968, and it con-
tributed to tension between Cuba and the Soviet Union that lasted until the
Soviet empire collapsed.
This is not where Cuban leaders earlier in the decade imagined that they
would be standing—once again caught in the middle of US-Soviet Cold
War tensions. Their hopes for a new world order were quickly evaporating.
They had lost key allies in the hemisphere as the result of right-wing coups
and the 1980 electoral defeat of Jamaica’s Michael Manley. Tensions with
the United States had increased to their highest levels in fifteen years, sig-
nified by President Carter’s order to resume aircraft reconnaissance flights
over Cuba. And on the island, there was growing unrest as 1980 began
because the economy was sputtering.
NOTES
1. Gabriel García Márquez, “Operation Carlota,” trans., Patrick Camiller, New Left
Review, nos. 101–102 (January–April 1977), 126, 128, 137.
2. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 257–59; LeoGrande and Korn-
bluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 123–26.
3. Bernard Gwertzman, “Rogers Says US Is Firm on Cuba,” New York Times,
February 16, 1973, 77.
4. Charles W. Whalen et al., “A Détente with Cuba,” Congressional Record,
January 29, 1973, H-2507-9.
5. US Senate, 93rd Cong., 1st Sess., “US Policy Toward Cuba,” Hearings before
the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, March 26 and April 18, 1973, 1.
7. Commission on United States–Latin American Relations, The Americas in a
Changing World (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1974), 29.
8. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 128–33.
9. As quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 267.
10. US House, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., “US Trade Embargo of Cuba,” Hearings
before the Subcommittees on International Trade and Commerce and International
Organizations, Committee on International Relations, on H.R. 6382, May 8 to Sep-
tember 23, 1975.
12. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 782;
Leslie H. Gelb, “US Relaxes Ban against Trading with the Cubans,” New York Times,
August 21, 1975, 1.
13. New York Times, December 21, 1975, 3; Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions:
Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 2002), 255–72; 285–93, 329–38; Kissinger, Years of Renewal, 782–84.
15. US Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Operations, “Activities of
Cuban Exile Leader Orlando Bosch during His Stay in Venezuela,” Digital National
Security Archive, Accession number: CL01549; Document number: IN 069101; Pro-
Quest document ID: 1679043549, October 14, 1976.
16. Saul Landau, “The Cuban Five and the US War against Terror,” in A Contempo-
rary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 273; Peter Kornbluh, “A Safe Harbor for Luis Posada
Carriles,” NACLA Report on the Americas 39, no. 4 (January/February 2006): 17.
17. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, 816.
18. Odd Arne Westad, “Moscow and the Angolan Crisis, 1974–1976: A New
Pattern of Intervention,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 8–9
(Winter 1996/1997): 25–26.
19. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 306–7.
20. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 7–9, and chapters 2–6.
21. David Binder, “Carter Says Cubans May Leave Angola, Is Receptive on Ties,”
New York Times, February 17, 1977.
22. Jimmy Carter, Presidential Directive/NSC-6, “Cuba” (Washington, DC: The
White House,. March 15, 1977), http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/pd
directives/pd06.pdf.
23. Quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 295.
24. Kathleen Teltsch, “Young, Taking Over U.N. Duties, Prepares to Leave for
Africa Today,” New York Times, February 1, 1977, 2.
200 Chapter 15
25. Associated Press, “Castro, Praising Carter, Sees a Prospect of Ties,” New York
26. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam
Books, 1982), 51.
27. Hedrick Smith, “US Says Castro Has Transferred 60’s Policy of Intervention
to Africa,” New York Times, November 17, 1977, 1.
28. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security
Adviser, 1977–1981, revised edition (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1985),
180–90; quotation is on 180–81.
29. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 128–40.
31. Quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 271.
32. Manuel Antonio Noriega and Peter Eisner, America’s Prisoner: The Memoirs
of Manuel Noriega (New York: Random House, 1994), 93–95.
33. PD-52 (October 29, 1979) is available at http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/
documents/pddirectives/pd52.pdf. Also see David D. Newsom, The Soviet Brigade in
Cuba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Gloria Duffy, “Crisis Mangling
and the Cuban Brigade,” International Security 8, no. 1 (Summer 1983).
Chapter 16
Mariel Exodus—
A Warning Signal, 1980
Pablo Armando Fernández had been a leader of Cuba’s avant-garde artistic

community in the early days of the revolution. As the deputy editor of
Lunes de Revolución, he used the publication to link many of the world’s
most creative masters to Cuba’s writers, artists, dancers, and film directors.
His first novel won a coveted award from Casa de las Americas in 1968.1
But by 1971, he had ruffled too many feathers. The government banned
publication of his writing.
In the 1970s, several of Cuba’s great writers went into exile. Fernández
stayed, working as a copy editor for a Cuban publisher and maintain-
ing his faith that the revolutionary government would rectify its error in
isolating him. That moment came in April 1980, when he was allowed to
accept invitations to speak at three US universities. The poet went to the
US Interests Section for a visa dressed in his finest suit. His large mane of
blondish white hair added to the image a distinguished man of letters who
deserves the highest respect.
Figure 16.1. Pablo Armando Fernández in

2009. Photo by Philip Brenner.
201
202 Chapter 16
But as he approached the entrance, angry onlookers waiting in a line

that stretched around the building began to shout at him: “Get back in line,
you bum. Who do you think you are that you can jump ahead?” They were
among hundreds of Cubans who had begun to queue outside of the US
diplomatic mission each day, hoping to secure a visa in order to emigrate.
“Tears came to my eyes,” Pablo remarked, “because this was so beauti-
ful. Twenty years earlier, such working-class people would have shuffled
out of the way to make a path for a well-dressed person like me who had an
appointment. But the Revolution had given these people something they
did not even know they had, even as they turned their backs to it. These
ordinary Cubans had acquired dignity.”
—Interview with Pablo Armando Fernández2
Events during the second half of the 1970s were like the winds that create
a perfect storm. The flood that followed was the emigration of more than
125,000 Cubans in the span of nine months—from April to December 1980—
many of whom left from the small port town of Mariel, twenty miles west of
Havana. The Mariel exodus was a startling wake-up call for the Cuban lead-
ership, because the marielitos were the very people whose lives the Cuban
Revolution was supposed to improve.
The United States was the natural destination for Cuban emigrants. It was
the richest country in the world and a short boat ride away. Prior to 1959, there
was a modest but steady flow of Cuban emigration to the United States. Pablo
Armando Fernández’s family moved to New York City in 1945, and he returned
to Cuba only after the 1959 revolution. The United States received 65,000 Cu-
ban immigrants between 1950 and 1958. Almost 100,000 Cubans emigrated to
the United States in the first two years after the revolutionaries overthrew the
Batista dictatorship. In the next two years, an additional 125,000 arrived, and
by the end of 1979, nearly 700,000 Cubans had moved north.3
PRELUDE TO THE MARIEL EXODUS: RISING DISCONTENT
The Cuban economy was coming out of the doldrums by 1973. In the first
half of the 1970s it grew at a remarkable annual rate of about 7.5 percent.4
Thanks to rising sugar prices, Cuba increased trade with Western countries.
At the same time, a critical mass of newly trained professionals enabled the
government to increase productivity, provide for increased personal con-
sumption, and complete major projects. But the boom was short-lived. In
the latter part of the 1970s, the price of sugar fell. Annual growth was only 5
percent in 1978 and 1.6 percent in 1979.5 While Cubans’ daily life worsened
only slightly, government leaders had led them to believe their lives would
Mariel Exodus—A Warning Signal, 1980 203
be getting even better. Their comparison to the “good times” just a few years
earlier engendered widespread discontent.
Projects were placed on hold and half-finished buildings began to de-
teriorate. Young Cubans were now better educated and more workers had
advanced training, but with the economy slowing down, many could not find
jobs commensurate to their skills. Moreover, the babies born in the boom
immediately after the Revolution were now entering the labor force. Under-
employment was growing even as the official rate of unemployment dropped
in the late 1970s to 1.3 percent. Factory and construction workers were laid
off temporarily due to shortages in raw materials.6
Meanwhile, Cuba’s larger role on the world stage entailed personal sacrifices
for young Cubans, especially those with African ancestry. More than 35,000
Cuban troops were deployed to Angola starting in late 1975. Another 15,000
went to Ethiopia in 1977. By 1980, more than 100,000 had served in combat
missions. The conditions in both countries were harsh, and there were times
when the troops were ill-equipped or short of supplies. Between 1975 and 1979,
the Cuban military may have suffered as many as 10,000 combat deaths and
many more casualties. These losses, along with the long tours of duty, report-
edly led to significant discontent among Cuban families with soldiers in Africa.
In 1979, a potent ingredient was added to the concoction of discontent
brewing on the island: an opening to Cuban-American visitors from the
United States. Until then, few exiles had been allowed to return to Cuba for
family visits. The process that set in motion this breakthrough began early in
the Carter administration’s second year, when there was a brief moment of
reprieve in Cuba’s long conflict with the United States. After Bernardo Benes,
a Cuban-American banker who favored improved relations and gave large
sums to the Democratic Party, had several meetings with high-level Cuban of-
ficials, he informed National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in March
1978 that Cuba wanted to discuss the possibility of releasing all political
prisoners. This report quickly led to direct, secret negotiations between the
two governments, and Fidel offered to release all political prisoners by the
end of 1979.7 According to Wayne Smith, who was at the time the principal
US State Department expert on Cuba, the United States would have to accept
all of the Cuban prisoners who wanted to emigrate. This stipulation, among
others, generated disagreements between the State and Justice Departments,
and the National Security Council staff, which in turn stalemated the process.8
Frustrated by the official US nonreaction, Fidel brought a new group into
the fray, the Committee of 75, a courageous assemblage of Cuban-Americans
who hoped to improve US-Cuba relations through a “dialogue.” At a press
conference in September 1978, he publicly invited the group to Cuba and
proposed discussing with them family visits by Cuban-Americans.9 In part,
204 Chapter 16
the Cuban leader sought to divide the exile community by elevating those
who wanted a rapprochement with Cuba.
Despite death threats from paramilitary organizations in Miami, and the as-
sassination of one of the group’s members, the committee traveled to Havana
in November 1978 to escort the first of 3,600 released political prisoners to
the United States, and to bring back the news that Cuban-Americans would be
allowed to visit their homeland. The first horde of visitors arrived in Cuba in
time for Christmas. By the end of 1979, more than 100,000 Cuban-Americans
had traveled to the island, spending more than $100 million.10 On some days,
as many as six charter flights arrived at José Martí Airport from Miami.
Philip Brenner was leading a group of twenty Americans on an educational
tour of the island in February 1980 when he came upon a Cuban electrician at
a hotel bar in Camagüey—a city in the middle of the island. José, as we will
call him, was in Camagüey as part of a crew from Havana to repair electrical
power lines. He and Brenner began to chat in Spanish, but José asserted that
he preferred to practice his English. “Oh?” Brenner responded skeptically.
“Yes,” he said. “I like to talk to Americans.” As they started on a third beer,
José asked almost rhetorically, “Perhaps you know my brother. He has the
best pizza restaurant in Miami.” “No,” Brenner replied, “I don’t know your
brother or the pizzeria. But perhaps I could take a photo of you and send it
to your brother when I return to the States, so that he can see how you are
doing?” “No need for that,” José chuckled. “He was here last month, and my
sister is coming next month.”
The best pizza restaurant in Miami! That was quite a claim, and no doubt
José was shocked to see the reality when he arrived in Miami, after the
journey we confidently assume he took from Mariel a few months later.
How was he to know that his siblings, like many of those who visited in
1979, exaggerated their success in the United States? While Cubans who
migrated before 1980 tended to be wealthier than other immigrants from
Latin America, the differences were not large.11 Yet it was understandable
that the émigrés sought to justify their decision to leave by suggesting that
the Miami streets were paved with gold. Exile is rarely an easy choice and
invariably leaves an emotional scar.
Cuban authorities did not anticipate the huge quantity of material goods the
visitors would bring—cargo loads of small stoves and refrigerators, air con-
ditioners, and other appliances that were difficult to obtain in Cuba. Within
months, though, they restricted what visiting exiles could bring into the
country, and at the same time permitted them to purchase overpriced Soviet-
bloc appliances for their families. The goods were sold at the former Sears
department store in Old Havana, which had been shuttered for twenty years,
and only Cuban-Americans were permitted to buy them.
Until then, a Cuban earned the right to purchase durable goods by being
an exemplary worker. Refrigerators and the like were apportioned to work
centers, which in turn allocated them to the best workers, though politi-
cal factors also were taken into account. All of a sudden, the system for
obtaining scarce goods changed. All that one needed was a visiting relative
who would buy it for you, or a friend who had a visiting relative. Cuban-
Americans often bought three or four refrigerators for their families, who
sold the excess on the black market. This change began to unravel the for-
mer incentive system controlled by the state, which relied on bonuses such
as refrigerators to reward meritorious work, and it contributed to a further
decline in productivity.
Darker-skinned Cubans, though, did not share equally in the new largesse.
Their families disproportionately had stayed in Cuba during the previous
twenty years because they tended to benefit from the Revolution. And so
there were fewer black relatives bearing gifts from Miami in 1979. The re-
sulting distribution of luxuries along racial lines added to a growing sense of
unfairness that some Afro-Cubans perceived. They had borne a greater cost in
the African conflicts, sacrificing for the Revolution, and were rewarded with
the short end of the bargain.
THE EXODUS
For months, there had been small incidents at several foreign missions in Ha-
vana. People seeking to leave Cuba were illegally entering embassy grounds
in search of asylum. The growing discontent was combustible and needed
only a spark for it to explode. On April 1, 1980, a Cuban policeman was killed
trying to stop six Cubans from crashing through the gate at the Peruvian em-
bassy. Cuba asserted the six had no justifiable claim for diplomatic protection
and demanded they be tried for the policeman’s murder. When Peru refused,
Castro withdrew guards from the embassy. In less than three days, 10,800
people crowded onto the Peruvian embassy grounds seeking asylum.12
A few months earlier, the Cuban leader had denounced the warm recep-
tions given to boat hijackers who arrived in Miami as tantamount to an en-
dorsement of such behavior. On April 21, he announced that Cubans would be
free to emigrate if they were picked up at Mariel harbor—about twenty miles
west of Havana—by boats arriving from Florida. A front-page editorial in
Granma declared, “We have ended our protection of the peninsula of Florida
. . . now they will begin to harvest the fruit of their policy of encouraging il-
legal departures from Cuba, including the hijacking of boats.”13 The next day,
a flotilla of small boats from Florida lined up outside the port.14
206 Chapter 16
Anti-Castro exiles charged that Castro added to the wave of émigrés by

emptying his jails and psychiatric hospitals. In reality, the United States de-
termined in 1984 that only 2,746 out of the more than 125,000 who left Cuba
in the Mariel exodus were excludable from the United States for reasons of
criminal behavior or mental incapacity.15
Still, the marielitos were different than previous waves of Cuban im-
migrants. They included more dark-skinned and younger Cubans. Nearly
half had held semiskilled or unskilled jobs, whereas only 8 percent of the
1959–1962 cohort were semiskilled or unskilled workers.16 They had expe-
rienced advancements the Revolution had produced: improved health care
for everyone and the eradication of epidemic diseases; the end of illiteracy
and universal access to a quality education. They had watched Cuba’s global
stature soar, and they had begun to acquire a new pride in what it meant to be
Cuban. Yet they were no longer willing to sacrifice for a future that seemed to
recede farther away, no longer able to suspend belief that life was not better
in the United States, and no longer motivated by revolutionary ideals to work
selflessly for a greater good.
NOTES
1. Pablo Armando Fernández, Los niños se despiden (Havana: Casa de las Ameri-
cas, 1968).
2. Personal interview with Pablo Armando Fernández by Philip Brenner in Wash-
ington, DC, April 18, 1980.
3. Felix Roberto Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants:
Cuban Migration to the US, 1959–1995 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996),
xxiv.
4. Andrew Zimbalist and Susan Eckstein, “Patterns of Cuban Development: The
First Twenty-Five Years,” in Cuba’s Socialist Economy: Toward the 1990s, ed. An-
drew Zimbalist (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1987), 12–13.
5. Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba, 40.
6. Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba, 129–31.
7. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 320–322; Peter Kornbluh and
William M. LeoGrande, “Talking with Castro,” Cigar Aficionado, January 2009, 8.
8. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 148–59. Also see Robert M. Levine, Secret
Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami (New York:
Palgrave, 2001).
9. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 327–28; Smith, The Closest of
Enemies, 160–63; Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 74–78.
10. Barry Sklar, “Cuban Exodus 1980: The Context,” in The Cuba Reader: The
Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove,
1988), 344.
11. Lisandro Pérez, “Immigrant Economic Adjustment and Family Organization:

The Cuban Success Story Reexamined,” International Migration Review 20, no. 1
(Spring 1986): 4–20.
12. Sklar, “Cuban Exodus 1980,” 340–41; Jo Thomas, “Crowd at Havana Em-
bassy Grows,” New York Times, April 7, 1980, A1.
13. As quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 355.
15. Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 93–95, 100–102.
16. Susan Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed
the US and Their Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2009), 16, 19.
Chapter 17
Change and Rectification

at Home and Abroad, 1980s
“Hey, what do you think we are, bourgeois?” shouts a short, thin man in
work clothes. “I make 138 pesos a month. You think I can afford to buy
onions at two pesos a pound? Three lousy onions for two pesos. ¡Que
va!” [No way!] All heads turn toward him, some voicing their agreement,
others just nodding. The vendor remains imperturbable. “You don’t have
to buy them, you know. It’s a free choice.” The worker looks up at him in
disgust. “You’re all just a bunch of bandidos [bandits],” he snorts. “And
just look at those hands. You’ve never even been near the soil!”
—No Free Lunch1
A NEW ECONOMIC PLAN
For most countries in Latin America, the 1980s were a “lost decade.”
Western banks, which were flush with deposits from oil-rich countries that
had benefited from the tenfold rise in petroleum prices during the previous
decade, needed new places to invest. They turned to South America, where
the region’s dictatorships were only too happy to use the easy loans to buy
weapons, monumental projects, and personal luxuries. They spent little of
the money on development and could not repay the loans when they came
due. Some governments, such as Peru, had to make interest payments that
were as much as 50 percent of the hard currency they earned from exports.
Mexico depleted its hard currency reserves in 1982 and nearly defaulted on
billions of dollars in loans. Cuba’s economic problems were not as severe,
but the 1980 Mariel exodus had exposed decay eating away at the Revolu-
tion’s foundation.
208
Change and Rectification at Home and Abroad, 1980s 209
Economic Problems
In the mid-1970s, Cuba had introduced reforms modeled on the Soviet sys-
tem as a way of integrating into the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance
(CMEA), the Soviet-led trade group. For example, the government created its
first five-year plan, which was accompanied by a program called the “New
System of Economic Management and Planning” (SDPE in the Spanish
acronym). JUCEPLAN, the Central Planning Board, was transformed from
a mere coordinating body to the main unit that directed all central planning.
There should have been little surprise that the new system would produce
exactly the opposite of the intended results, namely, increased productivity
and a greater number of products produced domestically. Productivity went
down, diversification lagged, and the country had to rely even more on im-
ports from the CMEA. Centralized rules, bureaucratic inflexibility, and prices
unrelated to costs led to widespread popular criticism, with even top leaders
themselves expressing frustration.
The SDPE was supposed to decentralize economic activities, and it did
achieve this goal with respect to farming. Until the mid-1970s, farmers were
allowed to sell their produce only to the state, and the government pressured
small farmers to work on state farms. Under the reforms, the government
reduced the pressure to work for the state and provided incentives for private
farmers to create cooperatives. The number of cooperatives increased from
forty-four in 1977 to nearly 1,500 in 1983.2
In 1980, in a seeming response to the Mariel exodus, the government
permitted farmers to sell their surplus output—their production beyond the
quota of products they had to sell to the state at fixed prices—to the public at
“farmers’ markets.” The prices in these markets were unregulated and were
generally much higher than at state stores. Still, the farmers’ markets were
popular because they provided items, such as garlic, that were often difficult
to find in stores. For pensioners on fixed incomes and less well-off Cubans,
the ration book (libreta) continued to provide a safety net of basic commodi-
ties in state stores at a subsidized price.
New regulations stipulated that the sellers at the farmers’ markets had to
be the actual producers. They also had to provide their own transportation to
the market. But the rule was honored in the breach, because farmers found
that both selling and cultivating their crops was too time consuming and
transporting produce to urban centers was too expensive. Instead, they turned
to entrepreneurial private distributors who were willing to serve as illegal
distributors and vendors.
The farmers’ markets did increase the variety of food available to Cubans in
urban areas, and perhaps even the total supply available. One report observed
210 Chapter 17
that farmers reduced waste because they could sell items that otherwise they
would have discarded.3 But the markets also created undesired consequences.
Some farmers illegally withheld some items from sale to the state in order
to reap higher prices from the private markets. Some stole state property—
seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer that they could not buy anywhere—in order to
increase production of commodities for the farmers’ markets.
A Plague of Intermediaries
Because the state could sell farm equipment only to cooperatives, individual
farmers were unable to plow their profits into capital investments—even
items as mundane as a hose for irrigation. Instead, they and the newly wealthy
middlemen engaged in conspicuous consumption. They bought expensive
items intended for export, such as high-quality rum, and paid exorbitant
prices for cars that only exemplary workers had been able to purchase.4 As the
anecdote at the opening of this chapter highlights, the growing wealth of the
vendors soon began to generate resentment among workers who were angry
about the high prices and the fact that most sellers were not farmers them-
selves.5 In effect, the farmers’ markets and the legalization of some private
services such as repairing cars were generating class divisions and income
inequality that was anathema to the founding revolutionaries.
Fidel made his displeasure known publicly as early as 1982. In a speech to
the Young Communists, he described the middlemen as “a plague of intermedi-
aries . . . who produced nothing and bought and hoarded products that in many
cases the farmers should have sold to storehouses for normal distribution.”6 He
acknowledged that farmers would want to earn more for their produce, just as
consumers would want lower prices. But they all had to consider what was
good for the country as a whole. The excesses caused by privatization, like the
desire of Marielitos to leave the country, he believed, was evidence that there
needed to be a greater emphasis on ideological development.
By 1986, Cuba’s leaders were fed up with the markets. They had tried to
control them by increasing taxes, monitoring sellers, and regulating what could
be sold. But the tactics expanded the black market and middlemen continued
to thrive. Finally, in April, Castro terminated the experiment. He shut down
private farmers’ markets and denounced the distributors of agricultural produce
who earned sums far greater than ordinary workers. “There are people who
unfortunately confuse income earned from working,” he declared, “and from
speculation and scams bordering on theft or that actually are theft.” At the
same time, he criticized managers of state enterprises for applying capitalist
principles—favoring the production of higher priced goods, which earned more
money for their firms, over the production of goods needed for social projects.
“These practices have to be rectified,” Castro asserted, by returning to the

fundamental principles of the Cuban Revolution. “There are some,” he said,
who think that socialism can be created without political work . . . I believe
that the problems must be resolved on the basis of morals, honor and princi-
ples. . . . In the face of external enemies and danger that lurks from the outside
. . . the Revolution will not only know how to overcome its weaknesses, its
own weaknesses, it will know how to defend itself from external enemies; that
this country will never return to capitalism, that this country will never revert
to being imperialist property.7
Rectification Campaign
At a deferred session of the Third Party Congress in December 1986, the PCC
set into motion the “process of the rectification of errors and combating nega-
tive tendencies.” It involved doing away with the material incentives intro-
duced by the SDPE reforms, ending the privatization of some services along
with the farmers’ markets, and recentralizing economic decision-making. It
also returned the Revolution to its 1960s roots in renewing Che Guevara’s
emphasis on “moral incentives.”8
Party leaders blamed the stagnation of Cuba’s economy in the late 1970s and
early 1980s on their own blind adherence to Soviet practices.9 Cuba would now
march in step to its own drummer. In setting Cuba on this course, Castro and
the PCC pointedly rejected perestroika, the new economic model Soviet premier
Mikhail Gorbachev had just introduced. Perestroika was a set of proposals for
economic restructuring through which the new Soviet leader hoped to reduce the
state’s role in the economy and place greater reliance on market mechanisms.
Though Castro pointed to commitments he shared with Gorbachev—for
peace, ending world hunger and poverty, and fighting imperialism—in a Feb-
ruary 1986 speech in Moscow, relations between the two leaders already were
becoming cool. Whether disagreements about economic policy contributed
to the tension between them is uncertain. Yet over the next five years, Cuba
grew ever more distant from the Soviet Union.10
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Recall from chapter 15 that the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a
major blow to Castro’s ambitions for the Non-Aligned Movement. He also
had hoped that Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley would succeed in
convincing OPEC members of the NAM to invest their newfound wealth—
as a result of oil price hikes—in third world countries instead of New York
212 Chapter 17
banks. But this dream of South-South development evaporated as Manley’s

demarche failed.
Meanwhile, Cuba had to contend with increased hostility from the United
States. By the end of the Carter administration, relations had returned to the
depths of the early 1960s. Thus, when President Ronald Reagan took office
he could rely on existing US hostility to provide firm ground from which to
launch a more threatening policy toward Cuba.
Cuban-US Relations in the Reagan Years

Several Reagan officials had advocated harsh measures against Cuba long
before they assumed office. In 1981, Cuba quickly became the focal point
of their anti-communist crusade, as they pursued a “get tough” policy. Sec-
retary of State Alexander Haig set the tone in February 1981, declaring that
the United States must “deal with the immediate source of the problem [in
El Salvador]—and that is Cuba.”11 Arguing that Cuba had been fomenting
strife throughout Central America and was the source and principal support
of civil unrest and revolution in Nicaragua and El Salvador, he reportedly
recommended that the United States turn “that fucking island into a parking
lot.” Senior Reagan officials were appalled by the suggestion and rejected it
out of hand.12
Still, the 1983 US invasion of Grenada was the kind of action Cuban of-
ficials could not dismiss lightly. Under the pretext of saving US medical
students on the island, the United States sent more than twenty thousand
marines to gain control of this small country of 100,000 people. The inva-
sion was triggered by dissension within the ruling party that led to the assas-
sination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. President Reagan had charged
earlier that Grenada was a threat to US security because eight hundred Cuban
construction workers were building an airport on the island. Using top secret
surveillance photos that mimicked those taken in 1962 of Soviet missiles in
Cuba, the president claimed that the airport was intended as a layover port for
Soviet bombers. In fact, the airport construction itself was a tourist attraction
not hidden from public view and the Cubans used architectural plans created
by USAID for the previous government. Grenada lacked an airport at which
standard Boeing 737 planes could land, which hobbled its potential for tour-
ists. Otherwise, its only source of income was sugar and nutmeg, a “strategic”
spice used in making pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving celebrations.
In many ways, the Reagan administration’s policy was a carryover from
previous administrations. Its goal was to isolate Cuba from the international
community and undermine the Cuban government’s legitimacy domestically.
In practice, the policy involved: threats to confiscate imported goods that con-
tained Cuban nickel; pressure on European allies not to renegotiate Cuba’s

outstanding loans; and reinstatement of the ban on US citizens traveling to
Cuba that President Carter had chosen not to invoke.13 In addition, the US
Navy demonstrated a show of force in the Caribbean reminiscent of military
exercises just prior to the 1962 missile crisis. Called “Ocean Venture 82,” the
three-week set of maneuvers involved forty-five thousand troops, 350 air-
planes, and sixty ships, and included an exercise to evacuate noncombatants
from the Guantánamo Naval Base. Cuba responded by placing the country
on full military alert.
Prior to 1981, Cuban-Americans had not relied much on traditional lob-
bying to achieve their aims. President-elect Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy
adviser, Richard Allen, sought to fill this vacuum with a group to which the
administration could claim it was responding as it shaped a hardline policy
against Cuba. Allen sent a team to Miami immediately after the 1980 elec-
tion to meet with Jorge Mas Canosa and other former Bay of Pigs veterans to
discuss creating the new lobby. Thus was born the Cuban American National
Foundation (CANF).14
It was no surprise, then, that Mas Canosa found a ready welcome at the
White House in 1981, as Allen had become President Reagan’s first national
security adviser. The Reagan administration’s encouragement of the CANF
was more than mere lip service. It funneled construction contracts, federal
grants, and program funding to CANF board members who plowed money
back into the organization, as well as congressional campaigns. At Allen’s
urging, CANF staff members reportedly received coaching from the Ameri-
can Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most influential lobbying
organizations in Washington.15
When Mas Canosa called for a radio propaganda station aimed at Cuba, he
was pushing on an open door. The idea had been proposed in a 1980 advocacy
paper by the archconservative Committee on Santa Fe. One of its authors
was Roger Fontaine, the first Latin America director of Reagan’s National
Security Council.16 The station was supposed to function in the way Radio
Swan did twenty years earlier, when the CIA created the propaganda outlet
as a way to support the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. But Congress forced the
administration to place the operation, named Radio Martí, under the Voice of
America’s nominal supervision.
Still, Radio Martí was headquartered in Miami and Mas Canosa served
as its first advisory board chair. The station began broadcasting its twenty-
four-hour mix of music, soap operas, slanted news, and anti-communist
propaganda in 1985. Though Cuba tried to jam the station’s short- and
medium-wave broadcasts, its soap operas were popular on the island (though
in 1994 the station changed its format to all “news”). Cuba has been more
214 Chapter 17
successful in blocking the signal from TV Martí, which was launched five
years later. The US General Accountability Office reported in 2009 that less
than 2 percent of the Cuban population ever listened to Radio Martí and less
than 1 percent to TV Martí.17
Cuba attempted to find ways to engage the Reagan administration posi-
tively. One time it even prevented an assassination attempt against Reagan
that Cuban intelligence agents uncovered. But the responses from the United
States were repeatedly negative. Wayne Smith, who served as chief of the US
Interests Section in Havana from 1979 to 1982 and courageously resigned in
protest, observed that “the administration cared not a whit about the facts or
the objective evidence.” Its policies in Central America and toward Cuba, he
said, were based on “ideological preconceptions and would not be budged
from that policy no matter what the Cubans and Nicaraguans might do.”18
Though Smith was generally recognized as perhaps the most knowledgeable
Cuba expert in the government, the Reagan administration did not even in-
form him about a planned meeting between Haig and Cuban vice president
Carlos Rafael Rodríguez in November 1981.
A Dialogue of the Hearing Impaired

The Haig-Rodríguez meeting was the first of four times Cuba and the United
States engaged in negotiations during the two Reagan administrations. Ar-
ranged by Mexican president José López Portillo, the first encounter was
more like a dialogue of the hearing impaired than a negotiation. After issuing
barely veiled threats of possible US actions against Cuba during the meeting,
Haig asserted that the United States was most concerned that Cuba was acting
as a stalking horse for the Soviet Union to create unrest in Central America
and harm US “vital interests” by sending troops to Nicaragua and El Salva-
dor. Rodríguez responded at length. He denied that there were any Cuban
soldiers in Central America and affirmed that while Cuba’s foreign policy at
times may have coincided with Soviet policy, Cuba was a sovereign country
that acted independently on the global stage.19
Analyst Peter Kornbluh notes that the two men came away from the meet-
ing with contradictory assessments. Haig, he wrote, “appears to have inter-
preted the meeting as evidence that US pressure on Castro was working.”
Rodríguez viewed Haig as more level-headed than he had believed before,
and “reasonably intelligent.” He was impressed that “Haig was willing to
send [Lt. Gen. Vernon] Walters . . . as an envoy to continue the talks.”20
Walters had served as deputy director of the CIA in the Nixon administra-
tion and became US ambassador to the UN in 1985. A close confidant of
President Reagan, he was a “roving ambassador” in March 1982 when he
went to Cuba. But Walters arrived “with a preconceived conviction that

Castro’s ideological commitment to communism foreclosed any prospect
of compromise. . . . Even Cuba’s suspension of aid to the Sandinistas [Ni-
caragua’s governing party] and the Salvadoran guerrillas was discounted as
ephemeral.”21 Thus, the second instance of negotiations came to naught.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, the third engagement came in
1984 over migration. The United States agreed to accept up to twenty thou-
sand Cuban émigrés annually. Cuba agreed to accept the return of some 2,700
exiles whom US authorities deemed excludable. But the success of these talks
did little to mitigate the Reagan administration’s antagonism toward Cuba or
Cuba’s fear of a US attack.
The focus of Reagan’s animus toward Cuba was Central America. In 1982,
the United States included Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism,
largely because of Cuba’s relationship “with the Sandinista Revolution in
Nicaragua, and with the on-going guerrilla movement led by the FMLN in
El Salvador.”22
State Department Propaganda Report on Central America
The Soviet Union sees in the

region [Caribbean basin] an excel-
lent and low-cost opportunity to
preoccupy the United States—the
“main adversary” of Soviet strat-
egy—thus gaining greater global
freedom of action for the USSR.
. . . The Soviet Union and Cuba
have worked effectively toward the
objective of establishing additional
Marxist-Leninist regimes in Central
America and the Caribbean.
Although Castro has become more
calculating in his export of vio-
lence and exploitation of poverty,
his aims remain as they were in the
1960s. . . . For its part, the Soviet
Union has intensified its efforts to
create chaos or conflict near the
United States to divert US atten-
tion and resources from Soviet challenges in other critical areas of the world.*
* US Departments of State and Defense, “The Soviet-Cuban Connection in Central America and
the Caribbean (Washington, DC: March 1985), 2, 10.
216 Chapter 17
Repeatedly, the president charged the civil wars in the region were due to a
“Soviet-Cuban connection” that manipulated the populace’s anger over their
poverty. A 1984 presidential commission on Central America—commonly
known as the Kissinger Commission after its chair, former secretary of state
Henry Kissinger—even devoted a section of its report to the “Cuban-Soviet
Connection.”23 In 1985, the State and Defense Departments issued a propa-
ganda pamphlet entitled, “The Soviet-Cuban Connection in Central America
and the Caribbean.” It was produced by the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD),
an agency with a benign-sounding name housed in the State Department’s Latin
America bureau. Later, OPD was caught up in the Iran-contra scandal because
of its illegal diversion of US government funds to election campaigns against
members of Congress who opposed the US-backed contra war.24
By 1987, US-Cuban relations were at their lowest ebb since the 1962
missile crisis. In March, the United States forcefully pursued passage of a
resolution in the UN Human Rights Commission accusing Cuba of perse-
cuting political dissenters. (It failed when Latin American members of the
commission supported Cuba.) In July 1987, Cuba countered with a televi-
sion documentary that detailed espionage activities by personnel in the US
Interests Section.25
Yet in January 1988, representatives of the two countries met for the first
time to discuss the conflicts in Angola and Namibia. Until then, the United
States had refused to attend any meeting about Angola with Cubans present.
One factor that moved the United States was the victory of Cuban military
forces at Cuito Cuanavale, Angola.
Cuito Cuanavale is a small town in southeastern Angola. The departure
point for a failed July 1987 attack by Angola against South African forces, it
was the location at which South Africa hoped to achieve “the total destruc-
tion of the enemy forces north of the Lomba [River],” in effect securing its
control over Namibia.26 The South African Defense Force (SADF) assembled
the largest set of ground and air forces for a single operation since World
War II. It combined with units from UNITA, one of the two guerrilla groups
fighting against the Angolan government. Angola’s military was supported
by 1,500 Cuban troops and some Soviet advisers, as well as Cuban engineers
and construction workers who built airstrips south of the conflict zone from
which MIG-23s could threaten important dams. Fighting lasted four months
and ended on March 23, 1988.
The four-party (Angola, South Africa, Cuba, and the United States) nego-
tiating sessions occupied the better part of a year and led to a historic accord:
Cuba agreed to withdraw troops from Angola and South Africa agreed to
withdraw from Namibia and allow free elections there. Namibia gained its
independence in 1990, and all South Africans were able to vote in April 1994
elections held under the rules of a new non-apartheid constitution.
Cuba’s cooperation and initiatives turned out to be essential for success.
The chief US negotiator later remarked, “We might still be at the table today
were it not for the Cuban factor.”27 Cuban officials hoped their positive con-
tributions would moderate US policy in the new administration of George
H. W. Bush. But from the new president’s perspective, Cuba had ceased to
be a country of significant interest. The Cold War was winding down and
the United States had achieved its particular objectives vis-à-vis Cuba when
Cuban troops withdrew from southern Africa, Nicaraguan 1990 elections re-
moved Cuba’s Sandinista allies from power, and negotiations ended the civil
war in El Salvador. So Bush turned Cuba policy over to Congress, where
CANF-backed anti-Castro members took charge, and Cuba policy moved
from the foreign to the domestic realm.
Cuban-Soviet Relations
Good relations between the Soviet Union and Cuba progressively deteriorated
in the 1980s. The falling out began with a trip to Moscow by Raúl Castro in
September 1981. In reaction to “the Reagan Administration’s aggressiveness
toward Cuba,” he told an interviewer in 1993, he was seeking Soviet reassur-
ance of military support in the event of a US attack.28
The Soviet response embittered and chastened Cuba’s leadership. Leonid
Brezhnev, the Soviet premier, reportedly told the Cuban vice president, “In
case of US aggression against Cuba, we can’t fight in Cuba. . . . We’d only
get a thrashing.” The message was clear. Cuba was utterly alone—“alone,
as we had always waged our wars of independence,” Raúl remarked in the
interview. His attitude echoed Fidel Castro’s 1968 comment to the first full
meeting of the PCC’s Central Committee, when he described his perception
of Soviet abandonment at the end of the missile crisis. “We realized,” he ex-
plained, “how alone we would be in the event of a war.”29
Cuban leaders called the Soviet position “the Pandora case,” and sought
to keep knowledge of it as secret as possible. They feared that if the United
States learned about Soviet unwillingness to protect Cuba, the Reagan ad-
ministration would be emboldened to commit aggression. In order “to disin-
form the enemy,” Raúl Castro said, Cuba’s public posture toward the Soviet
Union remained cordial and even improved. At the same time, Cuba’s leaders
requested more modern military equipment from the Soviet Union, built tun-
nels beneath Havana where people could go in case of an American attack,
and expanded its recently created Territorial Troop Militias (MTT).
218 Chapter 17
The MTT was intended to provide Cuba with the capability of countering
a US invasion with protracted warfare by citizen-guerrillas, which Cuba calls
a “War of All the People.” Fidel described the change to editors of the Wash-
ington Post in 1985. “Every citizen in this country knows what to do” if there
were an invasion, he said. “It would be very costly for us. . . . But it would be
very costly for the aggressors.”30 In 1981, half a million Cubans were enrolled
in the MTT. Once the rapid build-up began, its size grew quickly. By 1984, it
had 1.2 million members, more than one-tenth of the country’s population.31
Cuba and the Soviet Union also disagreed over support for El Salvador’s
insurgent organization, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front
(FMLN), and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Despite Reagan admin-
istration charges that Cuba and the Soviet Union were supplying weapons
to the Salvadoran guerrillas, the communists within the FMLN coalition
actually lost some influence when Moscow turned down their appeal for
assistance. The Soviet Union also tried to keep its distance from Nicaragua.
Fidel did not attend the 1985 funeral of Soviet president Konstantin Cher
nenko as a way of showing his displeasure with the Soviet Union’s low
level of aid to Nicaragua.32
Cuban Internationalism in Central America and Africa

Cuba continued to support the Sandinista government in the 1980s by send-
ing some of its own materiel, especially once the contra war heated up in
1982. It also deployed military advisers to Nicaragua. Yet Castro advised
Nicaragua’s leaders to avoid some of the errors he believed the Cuban
Revolution had made in its early years, especially antagonizing the United
States needlessly. In 1984, he urged them to work with other countries in
the region trying to end the US-sponsored internal conflict by supporting
the Contadora proposals.33
Political scientist Jorge Domínguez wrote in 1978 that “Cuba is a small
country, but it has a big country’s foreign policy.”34 In one sense, the assess-
ment accurately captured a distinguishing feature of Cuba’s international
behavior. Unlike great powers, small countries tend to focus narrowly, on
their immediate neighborhoods and not on the globe. Great powers with large
military forces can act with a greater sense of freedom than small countries,
because they perceive that only another great power can truly threaten them.
Despite its size, Cuba focused globally.
Cuban leaders shared with Fidel Castro a vision that their country should
lead a revolution on behalf of poor people everywhere. Party-controlled
newspapers such as Granma and state-run radio and television stations
covered world events extensively. Generally, these outlets are no more
informative than in-house corporate public relations newsletters. But their

depth of information about international topics—which is not commonly
found in most US media—has enabled ordinary Cubans to identify with the
struggles of people in other third world countries, as well as to understand
global affairs better than most Americans.
Even though Domínguez reformulated his summary description in 1985,
many observers of Cuba’s foreign policy—especially critics—stayed with
the early version. It includes a subtle denigration of Cuba’s behavior as be-
ing inappropriate for the country’s size—as if Cuba were a child trying to
wear an adult’s shoes. Yet the old formulation overlooks a key difference
between Cuba’s international orientation and those of most great powers.
Cuba has not sought to dominate and control other countries, nor has it
exploited the resources of another country for Cuba’s exclusive benefit.
There is an altruistic quality to Cuba’s internationalism, even as it may have
served Cuba’s interests.
Cuba’s commitments to the Popular Movement for the Liberation of
Angola (MPLA) and Namibia’s South West Africa People’s Organization
(SWAPO) were not based on expedient short-term calculations or spontane-
ous bursts of revolutionary zeal. They developed deliberately and patiently,
starting in the 1960s, and were deeply rooted in the Cuban revolutionaries’
belief that internationalism ultimately served Cuba’s long-term goals and
interests.35 Cuba’s military contributions to liberation struggles, technical as-
sistance to newly independent states, and education and health care to people
from the third world generated goodwill and allies. It also strengthened Cuba
by enhancing its “soft power”—the attractiveness of its ideas and culture in
other countries and the legitimacy of its approach to global politics.36
Cuban leaders hoped that as more countries shared Cuba’s views, its
internationalism would have helped to build South-South coalitions.37 Inter-
nationalism also brought ordinary Cubans into contact with the deep poverty
many third world people suffer so that new generations of Cubans who had no
memory of the 1950s would gain an appreciation for the achievements of the
Revolution. By the mid-1980s, approximately fifteen thousand Cubans—one
out of every 625—were working in civilian foreign aid missions in more than
thirty countries. At the same time, 24,000 students from 82 countries were en-
rolled in Cuban high schools and universities. In 1984, three-fourths of them
were studying at “internationalist schools” on the Isle of Youth.38
The Isle of Youth was the location of the infamous prison where Fidel and
Raúl Castro served time after the failed 1953 Moncada attack, when the is-
land was named the Isle of Pines. The government changed the name in 1978
when it established a novel education program for third world students, who
paid nothing for their schooling, room, board, and transportation. Selected
220 Chapter 17
by their governments—in the case of Namibia, by SWAPO—they attended

schools designated for their country, taught mostly by instructors from their
home country, whom the government also supported. Cuban teachers taught
math, science, and Spanish language courses.39
CORRUPTION
A distinguishing characteristic of the Cuban Revolution had been the lack

of corruption among senior officials. Most ministers and high party officials
lived in modest homes, drove rusting Ladas, and did not wear the kind of
expensive watches and jewelry that are conspicuous signs of inequality. At
times, when either of us wanted to show special appreciation to an official
who had provided assistance during one of our trips to Cuba, we would buy
a $25 bottle of Scotch whisky. The hearty thanks we received made clear that
this was a treat not regularly imbibed.
The military, on the other hand, seemed to be more privileged. In 1987,
Philip Brenner met Norberto Fuentes in his apartment, in a building reserved
for officers. A journalist, Fuentes had written favorably about the military
in a book and several articles, and had become a confidant of several senior
officers. He claimed to have access to a secret report that Fidel Castro had
written about the missile crisis that Brenner and Scott Armstrong, executive
director of the National Security Archive, hoped to obtain. The apartment was
filled with high-end consumer electronics, including three different kinds of
videotape machines for watching films. In offering Brenner a drink, Fuentes
opened a closet filled from top to bottom with imported whiskies. “How
can you afford all of this?” Brenner asked. Fuentes avowed that he earned
substantial fees for his lectures about Ernest Hemingway. Two years later, he
was arrested for serving as a kind of “bag” man for military and intelligence
officers engaged in illicit activities. Fidel Castro revealed that $200,000 was
found in Fuentes’s apartment.40
Fuentes was particularly friendly with General Arnaldo Ochoa and Tony
de la Guardia. Ochoa had been decorated as a “Hero of the Republic,” led the
team of military advisers in Nicaragua, and was a leader of Cuba’s force in
Angola in 1987 and 1988. De la Guardia had been a trusted though somewhat
irregular official in the Ministry of Interior (MININT), which houses Cuba’s
intelligence service and national police. He headed the security team protect-
ing Fidel Castro during his trip to Chile in 1971, and in 1980 took charge of a
unit within MININT responsible for importing and exporting goods blocked
by the US embargo.
When Cuban troops in Africa were short on necessities, including weapons,

Ochoa smuggled items such as diamonds for supplies through de la Guardia’s
networks. But Ochoa became too cavalier, and at one point approved one of
his aides to work with de la Guardia to help transship drugs through Cuba.41
The aide met with Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel in Colombia.
Fidel was furious about the contact. “That was a matter of enormous se-
riousness,” he told Ignacio Ramonet. “It put the country in the position of
being accused of being involved in drug trafficking.”42 Indeed, in December
1989 the United States invaded Panama, ostensibly to oust Manuel Noriega
because of his alleged involvement in facilitating drug shipments.
A nationally televised trial in June 1989 exposed Ochoa’s and de la
Guardia’s corrupt practices, and a subsequent military tribunal sentenced
them and two others to death by firing squad. Another two—including de
la Guardia’s brother, Patricio—received thirty-year sentences. Interior Min-
ister General José Abrantes was arrested shortly afterward and received a
thirty-year prison term.
As journalist Richard Gott aptly observed, “Not just the individuals in-
volved but the Revolution itself was on trial.”43 While some US commenta-
tors have argued that the real purpose of the executions was to clamp down on
an incipient move in the military to oust Fidel Castro and replace him with the
supposedly popular Ochoa, only hearsay evidence from some defectors has
materialized in nearly thirty years to support those allegations. In fact, Castro
attacked the intelligence service, not the military, replacing several interior
ministry officials with military officers. Our interviews at the time indicated
that the revelations of corruption actually shocked and angered Cuban leaders
because they believed that the corrosive petty criminality that was beginning
to proliferate, due to economic problems, could not be halted unless the lead-
ership remained uncorrupted.
NOTES
1. Medea Benjamin, Joseph Collins, and Michael Scott, No Free Lunch: Food
and Revolution in Cuba Today (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development
Policy, 1984), 61.
2. Benjamin et al., No Free Lunch, 167.
3. Benjamin et al., No Free Lunch, 69.
4. Eckstein, Back to the Future, 54.
5. Benjamin et al., No Free Lunch, 72–73.
6. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Closing of the Fourth Congress of the UJC,”
April 4, 1982, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1982/esp/f040482e.html.
222 Chapter 17
7. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Delivered on the 25th Anniversary of the Girón Vic-
tory,” April 19, 1986, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1986/esp/f190486e.html.
8. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en la Clausura de la Sesion Diferida del Tercer
Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba,” December 2, 1986, http://www.cuba.cu/
gobierno/discursos/1986/esp/f021286e.html; Partido Comunista de Cuba, Informe
Central Tercer Congreso, 1986, http://congresopcc.cip.cu/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/
Informe-Central.pdf.
9. Max Azicri, Cuba Today and Tomorrow: Reinventing Socialism (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2000), 24–26, 55–59.
10. Mervyn J. Bain, “Cuba-Soviet Relations in the Gorbachev Era,” Journal of
Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 773–77.
11. Alexander M. Haig, “Excerpts from Haig’s Briefing about El Salvador,” New
York Times, February 21, 1981.
12. William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central
America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 82–83.
13. John M. Goshko, “US Acts to Tighten Cuban Embargo,” Washington Post,
April 20, 1982.
14. Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in
US Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban American National Foundation,” Interna-
tional Studies Quarterly 43 (June 1999): 346–50; Elizabeth A. Palmer, “Exiles Talk
of PACs and Power, Not Another Bay of Pigs,” CQ Weekly, June 23, 1990, 1929–33.
15. Philip Brenner and Saul Landau, “Passive Aggressive,” NACLA Report on the
Americas 24, no. 3 (November 1990): 18.
16. Lewis Tambs, ed., “A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties” (Washing-
ton, DC: Council for Inter-American Security, 1980), 46.
17. US Government Accountability Office, “Broadcasting to Cuba: Actions Are
Needed to Improve Strategy and Operations,” Report #GAO-09-127, January 2009, 22.
18. Smith, Closest of Enemies, 249–56; quotation is on p. 256.
19. James G. Hershberg, ed., “Conference of Deputy Chairman of the State Coun-
cil of the Republic of Cuba Carlos Rafael Rodriguez with US Secretary of State Alex-
ander Haig, in Mexico, 23 November 1981,” Cold War International History Project
Bulletin, Issue 8–9 (Winter 1996–1997): 207–15.
20. Peter Kornbluh, “A ‘Moment of Rapprochement’: The Haig-Rodriguez Se-
cret Talks,” in Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 8–9 (Winter
1996–1997): 219.
22. Carlos Alzugaray and Anthony C. E. Quainton, “Cuban-US Relations: The
Terrorism Dimension,” Pensamiento Propio, no. 34 (July–December 2011): 75.
23. US Department of State, “Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on
Central America” (Washington, DC: January 1984), 88–91.
24. Thomas Blanton, ed., “Public Diplomacy and Covert Propaganda: The
Declassified Record of Ambassador Otto Juan Reich,” National Security Archive
Electronic Briefing Book no. 40, March 2, 2001, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB40.
25. Lewis H. Diuguid, “Spy Charges Strain US-Cuban Ties,” Washington Post,
July 25, 1987, A17.
26. Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the
Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2013), 398–99.
27. As quoted in LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 257.
28. Mario Vázquez Raña, “Interview with Raúl Castro,” El Sol de Mexico, April
21, 1993, excerpted in García Luis, Cuban Revolution Reader: A Documentary His-
tory of 40 Key Moments of the Cuban Revolution (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2001),
226–33.
29. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 60.
30. Leonard Downie Jr. and Karen DeYoung, “Cuban Leader Sees Positive Signs
for Ties in Second Reagan Term,” Washington Post, February 3, 1985.
31. Phyllis Greene Walker, “National Security,” in Cuba: A Country Study, ed.
James Rudolph (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985), 267.
32. William M. LeoGrande, “Cuba,” in Confronting Revolution: Security through
Diplomacy in Central America, ed. Morris Blachman, William M. LeoGrande, and
Kenneth Sharpe (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 253.
33. Center for Cuban Studies, “Fidel Castro on Central America,” Cuba Update
4, no. 4 (August 1983).
34. Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuban Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 57, no. 1 (Fall
1978): 83.
35. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 93–99.
36. Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Cuban Foreign Policy during the ‘Special Period,’” in
Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the “Special Period,” ed. H. Michael
Erisman and John M. Kirk (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 62–63.
37. H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-Soviet World
38. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 171.
39. Donna Rich, “Cuban Internationalism: A Humanitarian Foreign Policy,” in
The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al.
(New York: Grove, 1988), 607; Anne Hickling-Hudson, Jorge Corona Gonzalez,
and Rosemary Preston, eds., The Capacity to Share: A Study of Cuba’s International
Cooperation in Educational Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
chapters 2, 5, 7, 12.
41. Julia Preston, “The Trial That Shook Cuba,” New York Review of Books, De-
cember 7, 1989.
Part III
1990–2016
Chapter 18
The “Special Period” in a

Time of Peace, 1990–2000
I met the joyful young Cuban boy with bilateral retinoblastoma on a ward
round at the National Institute of Oncology and Radiology in Havana.
Although he had already lost his sight in one eye, he was a candidate for
an implant of radioactive iodine to treat the other eye. The medical skills
were available in Cuba, but the U.S. government had denied the pediatric
oncologist a license to import the iodine because “the radioactive medica-
tion was a threat to U.S. security.”
—Robin C. Williams1
RESOLVER
Imagine your reaction if you had to substitute sugar water for food every third
day for a year, and as a result you lost your eyesight because of a vitamin
deficiency (as happened to 50,000 Cubans temporarily), and 20–25 pounds
(the average for Cubans in 1993–1994). Imagine oil imports dropping by 70
percent over a four-year period (1989–1993) so that you could not drive your
car and buses ran infrequently because of gasoline shortages. Picture yourself
undergoing an operation at a formerly reliable hospital, where now several
doctors and nurses were absent because of transportation problems, and there
were hardly any anesthetics, medicines, or bandages. In 1990, few Cubans
imagined they would ever live this kind of life, even when Cuban president
Fidel Castro announced that the country was entering a “Special Period in
a Time of Peace,” which he said meant that “our country has to face an ex-
tremely difficult situation in supplying basic necessities.”2
By 1990, Cuba had developed to the point where infectious diseases
had been eradicated and its rate of infant mortality was comparable to that
225
226 Chapter 18
of advanced industrial nations; where there were more doctors per capita
than in any other country in the world and free universal health care was
available throughout the island; where universities had been established in
every province, education through graduate school was free, and racial and
gender disparities were disappearing because of educational opportunities.
Though Cuba was still a poor country by standard measures of GDP, it
was an egalitarian society where most people considered themselves to be
middle class and could reasonably hope that their children’s lives would be
better than their own.
Cuban planners had long nurtured an ambition to transform the economy
into a vibrant engine of self-sufficiency that would enable the country to
reduce its reliance on imports.3 That dream had been stymied by Cuba’s ties
to the Soviet Union and the Soviet trading group, the Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance (CMEA), which designated Cuba as a supplier of sugar,
citrus, and tobacco in return for oil, steel, and manufactured goods. As a re-
sult, Cuba focused much of its internal investment on producing goods for the
Eastern bloc instead of on diversifying its economy.
Still, the government did manage to develop some new industries—
pharmaceuticals and genetic engineering—based on its increasingly well-
educated population. It also was able to expand dairy production and create
light industries that produced items for domestic use, such as toilets. How-
ever, Cuba’s ability to diversify even to this minimal extent depended on
Soviet subsidies.
As the Soviet Union hurtled toward its ultimate demise, its economy could
no longer sustain losses on the products that it sold to Cuba at subsidized
prices. The overthrow of communist party–ruled regimes in Eastern Europe
and the collapse of the CMEA also forced the island to find new trading
partners. Eighty-five percent of Cuba’s international commerce had been con-
ducted with CMEA countries on the basis of long-term barter-like contracts.
The terms of trade in these exchanges, especially with the Soviet Union,
tended to favor Cuba and function like subsidies.
The CIA estimated that in 1989 Cuba received $4.5 billion in trade subsi-
dies and $1.4 billion in other development aid.4 It also had accumulated low
interest rate loans from CMEA countries worth $10 billion.5 The actual subsi-
dies were less than the CIA estimates because it valued CMEA products such
as tractors as if their prices on the world market were the same as seemingly
equivalent US products. But CMEA tractors, refrigerators, and so on were
inferior and attracted little demand beyond the socialist countries themselves.
Economists Andrew Zimbalist and Howard J. Sherman note that the CIA
calculations also did not take into account the millions of pesos Cuba wasted
on Soviet “mechanical cane harvesters, which didn’t work.”6
The “Special Period” in a Time of Peace, 1990–2000 227
Despite these limitations, the subsidies did enable Cuba to ride out eco-
nomic problems in the 1980s, and to use its scant hard currency earnings to
buy food and medicines that were distributed in an egalitarian way. Recall
that President Gerald Ford relaxed the US embargo in 1975 by permitting
US subsidiaries in third countries to sell products to Cuba. In 1990, food and
medicine made up 90 percent of Cuba’s purchases from these subsidiaries.7
Without the Soviet subsidies and CMEA barter arrangements, Cuba’s hard
currency earnings had to be apportioned among other necessities besides food
and medicine, such as oil. And Cuba had limited ways to obtain international
convertible currency. The global market prices for its commodities in the
early 1990s were falling—sugar had dropped to ten cents per pound, which
barely covered the cost of production.
As its international trade plummeted between 1990 and 1993, Cuba’s gross
domestic product (GDP) declined by 30 percent.8 Cubans experienced the
decline in the first instance by suffering hunger and then shortages of every-
thing, especially health care. By 1993, average daily caloric intake had fallen
below the basic level established by the World Health Organization. The
insufficiency of vitamins and minerals in the daily diet led to outbreaks of
medical disorders that had long vanished from Cuba. Even high Communist
Party officials experienced neuropathy—nerve damage—which can produce
sharp pains in fingers and feet, loss of a sense of touch, inability to control
muscle movement, and even temporary blindness.9 While the government did
establish a special food program to protect the health of the elderly, children,
and women who were pregnant or lactating, and maintained subsidies for
some basic items, most Cubans found the rations insufficient.
One project that Cuba abandoned because of Special Period hardships was
the schools-in-the-countryside (ESBEC) program. In practice, the students
turned out to be mediocre farmers. The citrus crop for which they were re-
sponsible languished, and in 1994, Cuba turned to Israel to help revive its
citrus industry. In addition, families increasingly opted out of the program,
even though the schools continued to provide food, lodging, and clothing
for the students. Most of the boarding schools that still operate today are
specialty schools in each Cuban province—for aspiring athletes and gifted
students—such as the prestigious Lenin School near Havana.
Resolver—to find ways of overcoming hardship—became the catchword
term everyone used to signify both frustration and determination. “How are
things going?” a visitor would ask. “No es fácil”—nothing’s easy—would
be the reply. People waited in long lines for food or buses that seemed never
to show up. They rode bicycles instead of cars as Cuba imported more than
one million bikes from China. They cheered Cuban Olympic teams that pre-
viously had amazed the world by attaining as high as fourth place in total
228 Chapter 18
medals, though in 1996 Cuba dropped to ninth place. At the 1993 Central
American and Caribbean Games in Puerto Rico, nearly 50 of the 450 Cuban
athletes sought asylum and chose not to return to Cuba.10
Philip Brenner was in front of a Havana hotel in 1994 when a rail-thin
man on a bicycle wheeled up to him with a hearty, “Hi, Phil.” Brenner
searched his memory but could not recognize the stranger. “It’s me, Car-
los,” former Cuban ambassador Carlos Alzugaray blurted out. “It seems you
have been doing a lot of bike riding,” Brenner responded. Alzugaray, who
is more than six feet tall, usually had weighed at least two hundred healthy
pounds. Yes, he acknowledged, “but mostly I have lost weight from eating
only three or four dinners each week. We have teenagers, and the food goes
first to them.” On the other days, he explained, he and his wife relied on
sugar water to satiate their hunger.
An Oxfam report described Cuba’s food dilemma by pointing to the disas-
ter Cuban farmers faced:
Imported inputs vanished—no chemical fertilizers, animal feed, tools, seeds,

wire, or animal vaccines. Fuel for tractors and irrigation systems was practically
unobtainable, as were tires or batteries or spare parts. Cuban-produced goods
such as feed, pipes, tools, fertilizers, and pesticides dried up because of the same
litany of problems: no raw materials, no electricity to run the factories, no func-
tioning trucks, and no petroleum. . . . Tractors stood useless in the fields, electric
pumps went dry and crops wilted . . . and animals died or were slaughtered for
food as their feed disappeared.11
Cubans’ poor diet contributed to an increase in health problems just when

the end of Soviet subsidies made importing medicine and medical supplies
more difficult. Polyclinics, hospitals, and pharmacies had shortages of every-
thing, from aspirin and antibiotics to spare parts for ventilators and monitor-
ing equipment. In 1995, a delegation of physicians from the American Asso-
ciation for World Health found that the US trade embargo made Cuba’s health
situation even worse. “Patient charts,” one of the doctors noted, “consisted of
microscopic handwritten entries jammed on every square inch of mismatched
and reused paper. . . . Water supply and treatment is a serious problem. Cuba
is not able to produce enough chlorine to disinfect the water,” he wrote.12
In the first years of the Special Period, Cuba’s oil imports declined from 13
million to 1.8 million barrels annually. Electricity blackouts became so com-
monplace that Cubans joked about having the occasional alumbrones (peri-
ods when lights were available) rather than apagones (blackouts). The energy
crisis included insufficient gasoline and diesel for delivery trucks, buses,
and private cars. It contributed to the government’s decision to downsize
the military from almost 300,000 full-time members to fewer than 100,000.
Its budget was cut by nearly 40 percent from 1990 to 1993.13 The Cuban Air
Force eliminated 80 percent of its flight training and practice missions be-
cause it lacked fuel and spare parts.
DUAL-CURRENCY ECONOMY EMERGES
As Cuba’s economic catastrophe endured, many of the more than one mil-
lion Cuban-Americans in the United States sought to help their families. But
Cubans were not permitted to spend US dollars on the island. When a family
sent money via a courier, a Cuban could use it only on the black market. In or-
der to undermine this rapidly growing informal economy, and to capture hard
currency that could be used for national purposes, the government legalized
the spending of US dollars in 1993 and opened Shops for the Recovery of
Hard Currency, or “dollar stores” as they were known generally, which sold
scarce commodities.14 In 1994, remittances rose to $262.8 million, and the
next year, they totaled $582.6 million. Nearly one-fifth of Cuba’s hard cur-
rency earnings in 1995 came from these monetary gifts from families.15 Thus,
the dual-currency economy began: Cubans were able to buy some goods (and
later services) only by using hard currency, a currency such as the US dollar
that was freely convertible in the international market. For everything else,
they used Cuba’s national currency, the peso (CUP).
Those who had access to hard currency generally fell into one of two
groups: (1) Cubans with relatives sending remittances from abroad and (2)
Cubans with jobs in the newly emerging tourist sector that enabled them to
earn hard currency from gratuities. Hard currency recipients in either cat-
egory unquestionably had an easier life than other Cubans. Even a monthly
remittance of fifty dollars from a relative in Miami could mean the difference
between suffering and comfort.
The uneven distribution of hard currency undermined the Cuban Revolu-
tion’s proud achievement of broad economic, social, and racial equality.16
Before the 1990s, the highest paid Cubans—such as doctors and engineers—
earned four to five times more than the lowest paid workers. The difference
between managers and workers was even less. That system of reward con-
tributed to the egalitarian character of the society, a reduced emphasis on
individualism, and incentives that enabled Cuba to develop a society notable
for its educated and healthy population. But the dual-currency economy en-
gendered new levels of inequality. If you wanted cheese, it was an import that
you had to purchase in a dollar store. Adhesive tape, needles and thread, and
even the most basic items associated with Cuban culture—coffee, rum, and
fine cigars—were available only in dollar stores.
230 Chapter 18
Cuban scholars characterize the new inequality as an “inverted pyramid.”

Sociologist Mirén Uriarte explains that the term describes “a phenomenon
that reflects the devalued return on education and professional preparation in
the new economy.”17 A doctor might have earned 1,200 CUP in one month,
but a taxi driver could earn that much in one week from tourists’ tips because
one US dollar was the equivalent of about 27 CUP in the 1990s. Suddenly
the incentive to study many extra years in order to be a professional and con-
tribute to the common good was overwhelmed by the need to earn money in
order to resolver, or even to survive. During the two-year period from 1993
to 1994, 8 percent of Cuba’s teachers took jobs that required only a minimal
education in the tourist sector.18
Families soon invented novel ways to earn extra income to make up for
low salaries, which was facilitated by a 1993 law that made self-employment
legal for 117 occupations—the most significant turn back to private enterprise
since the start of the Revolution. Individuals were now allowed to engage in
small businesses of their own, such as family restaurants known as paladares
(derived from the Portuguese word paladar, which means palate), bed and
breakfast accommodations in their homes, and craft stands. A 1998 study
reported that nearly half of the self-employed Cubans, or cuentapropistas,
were involved in “services and repair,” though accurate data on the number
of self-employed Cubans at the end of the 1990s is not available.19 While
209,000 individuals were licensed to conduct their own business in the peak
year of 1996, there were reports that the true number of self-employed busi-
nesses might have been twice as great as the official count.20
Most paladares operated illegally. These began as food carryouts from
homes and then expanded into eat-in restaurants. Legal paladares could ac-
commodate no more than twelve guests at a time, and only immediate family
members were permitted to work in a paladar. But the most popular ones
featured items such as lobster that one could obtain only on the black market
and were illegal to sell in a paladar. Indeed, hard times engendered corrup-
tion. Many daring entrepreneurs drove unlicensed taxis or rented rooms for
travelers without registering in order to avoid high taxes. Despite stiff penal-
ties for those caught, others sold scarce goods—tires, car batteries, copper
wire, cement, tools, and the like—on the expanding black market.
Some black-market products were provided by fishermen, farmers, or
skilled craftsmen who withheld a portion of their output from the official
distribution network. But many of the available items were stolen from gov-
ernment supplies, which led to further breakdowns in service. In 1995, Fidel
called for a crackdown on corruption, which was taking a significant toll on
Cuba’s recovery and undermining a culture of shared sacrifice for a common
national purpose. He charged that foreign investment was the root cause of
corruption.21 Yet the more likely source was scarcity and the growing inequal-
ity fostered by the dual-currency economy. A few months before Castro’s
speech, for example, a Cuban friend of ours described how he was able to
afford paying for the gasoline he used in his unregistered taxi business. He
knew a service station attendant who short-changed each customer by a hardly
noticeable 0.1 liter of gasoline. At the end of the day, the attendant had enough
“surplus” fuel to sell gasoline cheaply to his family and trusted friends.
RENEWING THE TOURIST INDUSTRY
The 1993 law that created the legal space for some small businesses was mo-
tivated in part by the need for tourist facilities. Yet the decisions to seek salva-
tion via remittances and tourism were not made lightly. In a speech on July
26, 1993, a chastened Fidel Castro suggested that they were taken because
Cuba was at a point where “we are willing to do whatever is necessary to save
the homeland, the Revolution and the achievements of socialism.” He hoped
the solution would be temporary so that one day hard currency that came to
Cuba “by way of remittances from abroad . . . tips, tourism, etc.” could be
used for the common good instead of enriching the few.22
Another concern about tourism on which top Cuban officials collectively
agreed was that it would lead to the acceptance of behavior the Revolution
had tried to devalue: conspicuous consumption, prostitution, and the glam-
orization of non-Cuban culture. Indeed, prostitution returned to the island
between 1992 and 1996. The government had suppressed and effectively shut
it down in the early years of the Revolution. But during the first years of the
Special Period, it turned a blind eye to sex tourism. It only began a crackdown
in 1996.23 Today, prostitution remains only a minor albeit visible element of
Cuba’s attractiveness to some tourists.
An additional problem associated with tourism, as Marguerite Rose Jimé-
nez explains, is “that local artists tend to skew their own social reality so that
it conforms to tourists’ expectations.”24 For example, while visiting foreign-
ers often want to hear the “authentic” songs of the Buena Vista Social Club,
Cubans themselves no longer embrace this pre-revolutionary style of music.
Much more popular, especially among young Cubans, is a distinctive form of
hip-hop that Cuban artists developed in the early 1990s. Musicians initially
mimicked rap songs they heard from Miami, but their music evolved into a
variant based on Afro-Cuban rhythms and Cuban instruments, and became a
vehicle for popular criticism of problems in Cuba.
Despite the leaders’ well-founded misgivings about tourism, it seemed
to provide the only short-term means of earning the hard currency that
232 Chapter 18
the country needed to recover from its deep depression. Yet two technical
problems confronted the government in trying to use tourism as the leading
sector for recovery. First, net earnings in hard currency tend to be low in the
first years of developing a tourist industry because so many of the comforts
that international tourists expect—new taxis, functioning air conditioners,
hot water showers—require products that must be bought abroad. As much
as eighty-eight cents out of every tourist dollar that Cuba initially received
was spent on the purchase of foreign goods.25
Second, Cuba’s hotel capacity could not accommodate the large increase
in the number of tourists the government suddenly sought, and many facili-
ties were not up to international tourism standards. Prior to 1959, Cuba had
been a popular destination for US vacationers. But, recall from chapter 6, its
popularity was fostered partly by gambling and prostitution, which were con-
trolled by organized crime. In 1957, about 275,000 tourists had gone to Cuba.
In 1972, while other Caribbean islands drew five million visitors, fewer than
100,000 went to Cuba.26
In order to increase the stock of hotel rooms, Cuba needed a quick infu-
sion of foreign investment. Under a 1982 constitutional amendment, modi-
fied by a 1992 law, foreign entities had been allowed to own only 49 percent
of an enterprise. In September 1995, the Cuban government approved a new
law that allowed foreigners to own 100 percent of a business. Cubanacán,
a semi-autonomous state agency, was set up to facilitate foreign investment
in tourism, mainly hotel construction, as well as to lure international com-
panies to manage hotels, which had been notorious for their poor service.
It promised investors that they could expect a full return on their principal
within five years.27
The reforms produced the desired result, an increase in the number of
available hotel rooms from 12,900 in 1990 to 37,200 in 2001. Foreign partici-
pation in running the hotels jumped from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent in
the same period. Even by the mid-1990s, gross revenues from tourism already
had surpassed those from sugar.28 In 2000, Cuba hosted 1.78 million tourists,
and more than 2 million in 2003. (The total reached four million in 2016.) The
largest number came from Canada, followed by Germany, Italy, and Spain.
THE UNITED STATES TRIES TO

“WREAK HAVOC” ON THE ISLAND
As the Soviet Union began its months-long descent into oblivion in 1991, Cu-
ban leaders felt increasingly vulnerable. In September, Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of all Soviet military forces from the
island. Pointedly, he did so without consulting Cuba in advance and after
meeting with US secretary of state James Baker.29 The Soviet Union seemed
more willing to placate the other superpower, Cuba’s avowed enemy, than to
give even the mere courtesy of prior notification to Cuba. Gorbachev’s an-
nouncement reminded Cubans of the 1962 missile crisis when Nikita Khru
shchev publicly declared on October 28—prior to informing Castro—that the
Soviets were withdrawing the missiles from Cuba.
The Soviet abandonment of Cuba encouraged the most determined anti-
Castro hardliners in the United States to strike what they imagined would
be the final blows that could overthrow the regime. This assumption was
reflected in the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s report on the 1992 Cuban
Democracy Act (CDA), which asserted:
The committee believes that the demise of Cuba’s patrons in the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe has intensified and brought to a head the inevitable
crisis of Cuban communism, and that the United States now has a unique op-
portunity to influence the course of change in Cuba in a democratic direction.
The bill sets forth a series of measures, consisting of both carrots and sticks,
designed to hasten a democratic transition in Cuba by increasing the isolation
of the regime while creating openings to democratic opposition groups that will
shape Cuba’s future.30
The CDA tightened the embargo by prohibiting foreign subsidiaries of US

firms from trading with Cuba, which had been authorized by the Ford ad-
ministration in 1975. It also denied foreign ships entry to US ports within six
months of having docked in Cuba. The latter provision was intended to raise
transportation costs for Cuba. International cargo vessels typically could not
fill their capacity with goods destined for Cuba because of its small market,
and would need to convey a portion of their hold to the United States for the
trip to be economical. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ), the principal House sponsor
of the CDA, almost gleefully told an academic audience in 1993 that his in-
tention was to “wreak havoc” on the Cuban economy.31
The legislation became law because of presidential electoral politics.
Arkansas governor Bill Clinton’s campaign funds were drying up after
allegations surfaced in January 1992 about his relationship with Gennifer
Flowers, an actress and model. While he sought to control the damage by
appearing on the CBS News program 60 Minutes with his wife, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, his campaign contributions did not increase sufficiently.
Desperate for funds, he came out in support of the CDA at a fund raiser that
garnered $275,000 for his campaign from Cuban-Americans.32 Even though
234 Chapter 18
President George H. W. Bush had opposed an earlier version of the CDA

on grounds that portions were inconsistent with US treaty obligations, he
felt political pressure to accept the legislation once Clinton endorsed it. It
became law two weeks before the election.
RAFTER EXODUS
While the CDA did not topple the regime, it did contribute to the misery
Cubans were suffering. By the summer of 1994 daily life—the lack of
food, money, and hope of improvement—had become intolerable for many
Cubans, especially in the cities. Despite the danger they faced in crossing
the perilous Florida Straits, an increasing number of people (known as
balseros, or rafters) attempted to leave the country in fragile rafts made of
inner tubes, wood slats, or anything that might float (see one such raft in
figure 18.1). In all of 1993, the US Coast Guard rescued 3,600 balseros.
Nearly that many balseros were rescued in the single month of July 1994.
In August, nearly one thousand departed Cuba each day.33
Figure 18.1. Cubans attempt to leave the island on makeshift rafts in 1994. Photo by
Willy Castellanos: “La Regata” (The Regatta); from The Series “North Bound, beyond
The Blue Wall,” 1994.
The situation already was getting beyond control in July 1994 when two
Cuban Coast Guard tugboats rammed a hijacked tugboat in Havana harbor,
drowning thirty-two balseros. On August 4, forty-one died after the Coast
Guard used high-pressure hoses to stop a ferry that the rafters had comman-
deered. In response, on August 5, more than one thousand people joined a
series of spontaneous street demonstrations not seen in Havana since the
end of 1958.
An incensed Fidel Castro blamed the exodus on US encouragement of
the rafters, and he warned that Cuba would stop preventing émigrés from
departing illegally if the United States continued to welcome them and
facilitate their movement. Indeed, Radio Martí, the US propaganda radio
station beamed at Cuba, regularly broadcast bulletins about the suitability
for travel by small boats in the Florida Straits. In addition, as Cuban so-
ciologist Ernesto Rodríguez Chávez observed, the United States had wel-
comed “those arriving in July and August, 1994, after stealing boats, using
violence, endangering the lives of people who did not wish to emigrate, and
even committing murder.”34
Until that point, it had been US policy to rescue rafters in the Florida
Straits and bring them safely to shore. Émigrés would then claim political
asylum, and after one year under the terms of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment
Act were able to secure permanent resident status. However, the Clinton
administration feared that in light of Cuba’s economic turmoil, the existing
policy could lead to a massive influx of refugees, perhaps even greater than
the 1980 Mariel exodus.
On August 19, 1994, the US president announced a new policy under
which Cubans picked up at sea would be transported to Guantánamo Naval
Base where the US Coast Guard already had sent more than twenty thousand
recent Cuban rafters who were living in makeshift housing and eating C-ra-
tions for their meals. In September, the United States and Cuba signed a new
immigration accord, permitting at least twenty thousand Cubans to obtain
visas through a lottery system or family reunification regulations, though the
Guantánamo balseros could not apply for visas.
In 1994, about 39,000 Cubans successfully entered the United States by us-
ing rafts. But twice as many may have died in the attempt, swamped by waves
or swept away in the ocean. The new exiles were strikingly different from the
first group who left Cuba immediately after the Revolution. While only 15
percent of the 1959–1962 group of émigrés had held semiskilled, unskilled,
or service jobs in Cuba, 58 percent of those arriving in the mid-1990s held
positions in those categories. It was an indicator that the poorest in Cuba suf-
fered the most during the early days of the Special Period.
236 Chapter 18
REORGANIZING THE CUBAN ECONOMY
The rafter exodus and popular demonstrations shocked Cuba’s leaders. The
1993 economic reforms were not producing change fast enough. Cuba needed
foreign investment beyond the tourism industry. It also needed to find a way
to import less food and produce more of it on the island.
Foreign Investment
Cuba’s record of expropriations and failure to repay foreign loans in a timely
manner contributed to the reluctance many European companies shared about
investing in Cuba. Yet the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was an even
greater obstacle. Private international financing often depended on a country
first receiving the IMF’s seal of approval. As the fund’s largest shareholder,
the United States most often determined decisions, and it opposed any deal-
ing with Cuba. In turn, Cuba refused to be a member of the IMF.
While sugar had been Cuba’s main export for two centuries, the more
meaningful potential for development rested with its nickel reserves. The
worldwide demand for nickel was growing in the 1990s because it is essential
for producing corrosion-resistant alloys such as stainless steel and was used
as a component in many batteries. Cuba has the world’s fifth largest reserves,
with deposits thirty-four times greater than those in the United States.35 It
also has petroleum deposits that could have reduced its import needs. But its
antiquated equipment hampered the extraction of both nickel and oil.
Until 1991, Cuba exported all of its nickel and cobalt to the Soviet Union
for refining. But after successfully wooing Canada’s Sherritt International to
modernize operations at the decrepit Moa nickel mine facility, Cuba began
to earn money from nickel exports. By 2001, it was the world’s sixth larg-
est producer of nickel and accounted for 10 percent of the world’s cobalt, a
byproduct in the nickel extraction process.36
Meanwhile, with the end of subsidized oil shipments from the Soviet
Union, Cuba began serious exploration for crude oil and gas. Between 1994
and 2000, production doubled to nearly 50,000 barrels of crude oil per day,
about 25 percent of its daily consumption.37 Cuba also signed agreements with
several foreign companies—Brazil’s Petrobras, Venezuela’s PDVSA, China’s
Sinopec, India’s OVL/ONGC, Spain’s Repsol-YPF, and Canada’s Sherritt—to
begin deep-water oil and gas exploration off Cuba’s northern coast.
While the efforts to attract foreign capital led to accumulated investments
of just over $2 billion by 2001, the GDP at that point was still 18 percent
lower than it had been in 1990, at the start of the Special Period, and annual
totals fluctuated widely.38 However, the government’s determination to cap-
ture hard currency did result in a notable success. By 2002, Cuba was keeping
sixty-eight cents from every dollar that tourists spent.39
Food Production
In late 1993, the Cuban government issued a broad decree that would funda-
mentally change the basis of agricultural production, breaking up more than
two-thirds of state farm enterprises into smaller units that would be given to
individuals or run by cooperatives. By 2003, the measure had created 36,000
such cooperatives, named Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPC)
(Unidades Básicas de Producción Cooperativa). Within a decade, the UBPCs
operated 55 percent of Cuba’s arable land and employed 300,000 people.40
Under the new regulations, the government permitted both individual
farmers and UBPCs to sell whatever they produced beyond the amount they
had agreed to deliver to the state. This meant that private farmers could offer
their produce at mercados agropecuarios—farmers’ markets—established by
the government in late 1994. This incentive-based farming did much more
than provide domestically grown food for tourists; it increased the amount of
food available for Cubans and undercut the prices they had been paying on
the black market.
At about the same time, Cuban officials opted to turn their shortages
into an advantage—“going against the grain” as an Oxfam America report
characterized the decision—to promote urban organic farms. Along with its
development of cooperatives and farmers’ markets, urban farming consti-
tuted an agrarian reform as significant as the nationalization and land distri-
butions that took place from 1959 to 1963.41 The earlier reforms had created
large state farms that produced sugar, cattle, citrus, and rice. Even before
the Special Period, they had proved to be inefficient, in part because each
farm focused on a single commodity, which damaged the soil and caused
environmental damage.42
Urban farms began as a spontaneous response to the problem of food short-
ages and survival (see an urban farm in figure 18.2). By 2001, such farms
generated half of Havana’s fresh produce. Initially, “farms” were small plots
located on vacant lots or even in alleys between buildings. Without access to
petroleum-based fertilizers and other chemicals, the farmers relied on organic
methods because there was no alternative. They used compost to create raised
beds, flowers for defense against insects, and fecal matter and decay from
worms to fertilize the soil. Because the lack of fuel prevented crops from be-
ing transported long distances, growers needed to be close to the point of sale.
A environmental movement—“buy local”—that is now becoming popular in
the United States emerged in Cuba twenty years ago out of necessity.
238 Chapter 18
Figure 18.2. An urban farm in Havana. Photo by Doyle L. Niemann.
A 1997 law granted urban dwellers the right to cultivate up to 15 percent

of a hectare (about one-third of an acre) in plots on the periphery of cities.
Within two years the government had distributed such land to nearly 200,000
people.43 Environmentalist Bill McKibben judged in 2005 that the resulting
agricultural system “may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-
sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of
the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back
and forth.”44 Indeed, Cuba has become a world leader in the field of agroecol-
ogy, the “attempt to minimize the use of fossil fuels, including petroleum, and
their derivatives, such as chemical pesticides and fertilizers, in production
and transportation,” economist Sinan Koont reports. He adds, it “is holistic
and pays full attention to environmental concerns and to the human partici-
pants in their political, economic, social, and cultural settings.”45
NOTES
1. Robin C. Williams, “In the Shadow of Plenty, Cuba Copes with a Crippled
Health Care System,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution,
ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 281.
2. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Sixteenth Congress of the CTC,” XVI Con-
greso de la CTC, January 28, 1990, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1990/esp/
f280190e.html.
3. Pedro Monreal, “Development as an Unfinished Affair: Cuba After the ‘Great
Adjustment’ of the 1990s,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolu-
tion, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 117–19.
4. Eliana A. Cardoso and Ann Helwege, Cuba After Communism (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1992), 31.
5. Domínguez, To Make the World Safe for Revolution, 90.
6. Andrew Zimbalist and Howard J. Sherman, Comparing Economic Systems: A
Political-Economic Approach (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984), 386.
7. Donna Rich Kaplowitz and Michael Kaplowitz, New Opportunities for US-
Cuban Trade (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 11–13.
8. Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuba’s Economic Transition: Successes, Deficiencies,
and Challenges,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed.
Jorge I. Domínguez, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, and Lorena Barberia (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19.
9. Katherine Tucker and Thomas R. Hedges, “Food Shortages and an Epidemic
of Optic and Peripheral Neuropathy in Cuba,” Nutrition Reviews 51, no. 12 (1993):
349–57.
10. Paula Pettavino and Philip Brenner, “More Than Just a Game: The Dual Devel-
opmental Aspects of Cuban Sports,” Peace Review 11 no. 4 (December 1999): 527.
11. Minor Sinclair and Martha Thompson, “Going Against the Grain: Agricultural
Crisis and Transformation,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revo-
lution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 157.
12. As quoted in Williams, “In the Shadow of Plenty,” 282–83.
13. Hal Klepak, “Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces: Last Bulwark of the State!
Last Bulwark of the Revolution?” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the
Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007);
Klepak, Raúl Castro and Cuba, 57–68
14. Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide, 214–15.
15. Lorena Barberia, “Remittances to Cuba: An Evaluation of Cuban and US
Government Policy Measures,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-
First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004), 368.
16. Mayra Paula Espina Prieto, “Social Effects of Economic Adjustment: Equality,
Inequality and Trends toward Greater Complexity in Cuban Society,” in The Cuban
Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 219–25.
17. Mirén Uriarte, “Social Impact of the Economic Measures,” in A Contemporary
Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 286.
18. Uriarte, “Social Impact of the Economic Measures,” 286.
19. Philip Peters and Joseph L. Scarpaci, “Cuba’s New Entrepreneurs: Five Years
of Small-Scale Capitalism” (Arlington, VA: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, August
1998), 7.
240 Chapter 18
20. William M. LeoGrande and Julie M. Thomas, “Cuba’s Quest for Economic
Independence,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34, part 2 (May 2002): 354; Ted
Henken, “Vale Todo: In Cuba’s Paladares, Everything Is Prohibited but Anything
Goes,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip
Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 171–73.
21. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” Plaza de la Revolucion, Havana, July 26, 1995,
22. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso,” Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 1993, http://www
.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1993/esp/f260793e.html.
23. Elisa Facio, “Jineterismo during the Special Period,” in Cuban Transitions at
the Millennium, ed. Eloise Linger and John W. Cotman (Largo, MD: International
Development Options, 2000).
24. Marguerite Rose Jiménez, “The Political Economy of Leisure,” in A Contem-
porary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip Brenner et al.
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 177.
25. Philip Peters, “International Tourism: The New Engine of the Cuban Econ-
omy,” (Arlington, VA: Lexington Institute, 2002), 7.
26. Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 205.
27. Eckstein, Back to the Future, 69, 104.
28. Schwartz, Pleasure Island, 206.
29. Thomas L. Friedman, “Soviet Turmoil; Gorbachev Says He’s Ready to Pull
Troops Out of Cuba and End Castro’s Subsidies,” New York Times, September 12,
1991, A1.
30. US Congress, House of Representatives, “Cuban Democracy Act of 1992,”
Report from the Committee on Foreign Affairs on H.R. 5253, 102nd Cong., 2nd Sess.,
House Report 102615, Part 1, June 25, 1992, 1.
31. Comments to the Cuba Study Group, Georgetown University, Washington,
DC, May 13, 1993.
32. Tom Fiedler, “Clinton Backs Torricelli Bill: ‘I Like It,’ He Tells Cuban Exiles,”
Miami Herald, April 24, 1992, A1.
33. Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 137–41.
34. Ernesto Rodríguez Chávez, “La crisis migratoria . . .” as quoted in Masud-
Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the US,
1959–1995 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 138.
35. US Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey, “Mineral Commodity
Summaries 2015,” January 2015, 109.
36. Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment
in Economic Development: The Cuban Experience,” in The Cuban Economy at the
Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 180–81.
37. A. Alhajji and Terry L. Maris, “The Future of Cuba’s Energy Sector,” in Cuba
Today: Continuity and Change since the “Periodo Expecial,” ed. Mauricio A. Font
(New York: Bildner Center, CUNY, 2004).
38. Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuba’s Economic Transition: Successes, Deficiencies,

and Challenges,” in The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, ed.
Jorge I. Domínguez et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19–20; Paolo
Spadoni, Failed Sanctions: Why the US Embargo Against Cuba Could Never Work
39. Peters, “International Tourism,” 7.
40. Frederick S. Royce, “Agricultural Production Cooperatives: The Future of Cu-
ban Agriculture,” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 14, no. 1 (Spring
2004): 20.
41. Minor Sinclair and Martha Thompson, Cuba, Going Against the Grain: Agri-
cultural Crisis and Transformation (Boston: Oxfam America, 2001), 19.
42. Sinan Koont, “Cuba’s Recent Embrace of Agroecology: Urban and Suburban
Agriculture,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro,
ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 399.
43. Sinclair and Thompson, Cuba, Going Against the Grain, 23.
44. Bill McKibben, “The Cuba Diet: What Will You Be Eating When the Revolu-
tion Comes?” Harper’s Magazine 310, issue 1859 (April 2005): 62.
45. Koont, “Cuba’s Recent Embrace of Agroecology,” 399–400.
Chapter 19
The Cuban Diaspora

and Racial Inequality
My father’s family came to Cuba from Spain in the 1800s and settled in
Bayamo, Oriente, where the family had rice plantations. I was born in
Havana, went to Bayamo at the age of six months and stayed there until
the age of five, when I started attending Havana’s most elite academy, the
Sacred Heart School run by French nuns.
My mother’s family arrived in Cuba from Spain in the 1700s, settling
in Matanzas. The family was very wealthy; my grandfather’s grandfather
established the first sugar refinery on the Island. My grandfather was
born in Cárdenas but was educated in the United States. His aunt and
uncle—Emilia and Miguel Teurbe Tolón—created the Cuban flag. They
were very nationalistic and against Spain because of the colonial system’s
abuses. Sugar gave them close ties to the United States, and they aligned
themselves with the United States. Emilia was the first woman to have
been expelled from Cuba for political reasons. The Spaniards had expelled
Miguel before her and she joined him in New York.
It was there in 1849 that Narciso López, a Spanish general, asked
Miguel to design the flag and Emilia to sew it. Gen. López had sought
recruits and financing in the United States in order to invade Cuba, with
the goal of freeing the country from Spain.
When the Revolution triumphed, my family had enormous expectations.
They disliked Batista enormously. We were not in politics or politically
inclined, but we definitely supported the Revolution. My grandfather even
hosted some of the rebels at the Havana Yacht Club. There was a feeling
that this was a great new beginning for the country.
But when [Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas] Mikoyan arrived [in 1960]
my parents got nervous. The conversation became one of good and evil:
good United States, evil Russia. End of the discussion. There was no
compromise there. So that’s when my grandfather decided to send me and
my cousin to the United States with Operation Peter Pan, for what they
242
The Cuban Diaspora and Racial Inequality 243
considered would be a short period of time. It was January 1961 and I was
14 years old. Everybody and their brother knew the invasion was com-
ing. And they wanted me out of the country. And then when the invasion
backed by the US won, we could come back to Cuba and resume our lives.
By 1962 all of my immediate family had moved to Miami. They always
thought they were going back to Cuba, especially in the first ten years,
when they were in a holding pattern, making the best of it. And it was
rough. My grandfather must have been in his late sixties, and he was park-
ing cars as a valet in Miami Beach. He was also a night clerk at a hotel
in Coral Gables because we had to eat. They brought nothing with them,
maybe $50 or $100 dollars. We were not allowed to take more, not even
jewelry. There were Cubans that did come out with a lot of money, mil-
lions that they stole, people tied to the Batista government. But the vast
majority of Cubans who came in the sixties, came with nothing. It was five
of us in two bedrooms and one bath. But I never felt poor, because we had
the United States and my family had enormous dignity.
I wasn’t politically active. I was trying to be an American, trying to
make ends meet economically. I got married, had children. I was trying to
survive in a very Cuban environment. In my workplace I only socialized
with Americans. But my life was of a Cuban-American. There were so
many of us here. All my friends that left were here. It was like transplant-
ing Havana to Miami.
—Silvia Wilhelm, July 20161
DIASPORA
The Cuban diaspora has long been an essential part of Cuba’s story. In
1824, the poet José Maria Heredia referenced his exile in the stirring poem
“Niágara,” a metaphor for Cuban independence, and the next year he wrote
“Himno del Desterrado” (Hymn of the Exile).2 José Martí, Cuba’s indepen-
dence leader, wrote from exile in New York in the 1880s. The literature about
the Cubans’ sense of identity highlights exile as a primary element, especially
in the way Cubans relate to the United States. “The experience of exile,”
historian Louis Pérez informs us, “was decisive to the ways Cubans arrived
at nationality and identity.”3 In Spanish, the infinitive form of the word “to
exile” (desterrar), also means “to remove earth from.” It suggests, Pérez ex-
plains, “adaptation as a means of survival. . . . The deployment of migratory
energies propelled vast numbers across boundaries to chart new territories
and explore new possibilities. . . . Exile was an occasion to discard the old
and adopt the new.”4
About 5.5 million people lived in Cuba in 1959. That year, fifty thousand
(about 1 percent of the population) left as quickly as possible. By the end of
244 Chapter 19
1979, another 550,000 had departed. These émigrés were largely conserva-
tive Catholics and light-skinned—natural opponents of the Revolution, which
“represented a rejection of all that they stood for,” sociologist Susan Eckstein
points out.5 In leaving Cuba rather than opposing revolutionary changes from
within, the exiles enabled the Revolution to develop without the kind of blood
bath or wrenching civil war that other countries with similar upheavals have
endured. Instead, some exiles sought to use the United States to achieve their
aim of changing the regime. But the stereotype of a “typical” anti-Castro Cu-
ban American misses the way the community has changed since 1959.
Not all emigrants went to the United States. Some favored Spanish-
speaking countries, and Spain became especially attractive in 2002 when
the Madrid government allowed foreign-born children and grandchildren of
Spaniards who had emigrated to claim Spanish citizenship. Still, Cuba’s dias-
pora community largely lives in the United States. Between 1959 and 2004,
89 percent of Cuba’s émigrés went to the mainland and Puerto Rico. A 2013
Pew study found that nearly “two million Hispanics of Cuban origin reside in
the United States” (nearly 4 percent of the US Hispanic population), of whom
850,000 are US-born.6
Waves of Cubans Go to the United States

Cubans moved to the United States in five distinct waves after 1958. From
1959 to 1962 approximately 225,000 departed in the first wave. They com-
prised the wealthiest Cubans, those tied to US corporations or associated with
the Batista regime, as well as professionals, engineers, and 80 percent of the
country’s physicians—people whose expertise was essential for the country’s
stability and the regime’s survival. Eckstein and Lorena Barberia aptly char-
acterize this first wave as a “class exodus.”7
This brain drain placed an immediate stress on the country and stymied
plans for development. While many left because they opposed the economic
and political direction in which the Revolution was heading, the United States
also encouraged such people to leave, in order to undermine the revolution-
ary government’s viability. In addition, as we described in chapter 9, the CIA
and the Catholic Church airlifted about 14,000 Cuban children to the United
States in Operation Peter Pan after disseminating false information about al-
leged Cuban government plans to deny parents any rights over their children.
Regardless of the reasons why Cubans left the country, they all tended to
justify their exile in political terms, as anti-communist, even though the Cu-
ban leadership had its own disagreements with members of the old commu-
nist party.8 The United States quickly classified all Cuban émigrés as political
refugees, declaring that Cubans “fleeing from Communist oppression” were

entitled to political asylum.
Incensed by the US politicization of emigration, and seeking a way to de-
fuse growing domestic discontent, Fidel announced in September 1965 that
any Cuban with a relative in the United States could depart freely from the
port of Camarioca, sixty-five miles east of Havana on Cuba’s northern coast.9
This began the second wave. Nearly seven thousand took advantage of the
opening, with flotillas of small boats arriving from South Florida to retrieve
them. In December 1965, Cuba and the United States signed a memorandum
of understanding with the Swiss government, which provided for an orderly
departure of refugees via Pan American Airways. There were 45,000 in 1966
alone, and by 1973, when the program ended, the Swiss had arranged for
some 260,000 Cubans to migrate to the United States. The United States
dubbed the program “freedom flights.”10
Congress responded to the influx by passing the 1966 Cuban Adjustment
Act (CAA), which allowed exiles to obtain permanent resident status—and
ultimately citizenship—after being in the United States for one year and a
day.11 In practice, that meant nearly all Cuban exiles could obtain citizenship
because the review of an asylum case typically took more than one year. In
effect, the review became moot once a Cuban was on US territory for more
than one year.
The CAA remains in effect today and continues to serve as a magnet for
Cubans. However, in the waning days of his administration, on January 12,
2017, President Barack Obama did end the policy of presuming that any Cu-
ban who arrives on US territory, with or without a visa, is a political refugee.
Apart from the CAA, the US government provided more than $1 billion in
assistance to Cuban exiles through the Cuban Refugee Program, which oper-
ated from 1961 to 1974.12 New arrivals received generous adjustment pay-
ments for food and clothing, housing, relocation assistance, and education, as
well as health care and ready access to Small Business Administration loans.
Historian Felix Masud-Piloto observes that the program was “the largest . . .
and most expensive aid program for refugees from Latin America ever under-
taken by the United States.”13
Still, Cubans who applied for visas often did so at great personal cost. In
some cases, they lost their jobs. Local Committees for the Defense of the
Revolution marked them as “anti-social,” and their children were taunted at
school. Cuban government officials stigmatized them as gusanos, or worms.
In chapter 16, we described the third wave of emigration, the 1980 Mariel
exodus, during which more than 125,000 people left Cuba. Both islanders
and exiles referred to them as Marielitos. In part as a reaction to this wave,
246 Chapter 19
the Reverend Jesse Jackson traveled to Cuba in 1984, seeking to spur Cuban-
US negotiations on migration. Jackson all but dragged President Castro to a
church service with him one Sunday and then encouraged the Cuban leader
to engage with the United States in talks. As a result, Cuba agreed to al-
low the return of 2,746 Marielitos whom the United States had considered
“excludable” from receiving permanent US resident status, and the United
States agreed to allow the orderly entry of up to 20,000 Cubans annually. But
the modifier “up to” became a source of dispute between the two countries.
Cubans expected the United States would grant 20,000 immigrant visas an-
nually. The actual numbers were far lower. In 1990, the United States issued
only five thousand immigrant visas to Cubans, and the total went as low as
two thousand in some years.
The fourth wave of émigrés came in the 1990s, during the rafter episode
that we discussed in the last chapter. Nearly forty thousand Cubans arrived
in the United States in 1994 and 1995, and at least that number probably
drowned as they challenged the terrifying Florida Straits. A fifth phase of
emigration began in the aftermath of the 1995 accord, which eliminated the
imprecision in the previous quota agreement. The words “up to” were re-
moved—the number was to be 20,000 entry visas every year. The quota was
reached by various means, including a lottery system in some years and by
spousal entry. Between 1996 and 2015, there was a fairly regular legal exodus
of at least 20,000 Cubans to the United States every year.
After the December 2014 Cuban-US announcement of diplomatic re-
lations, the number of Cubans trying to enter US territory without visas
swelled. A Pew Research Center study found that at least 43,159 Cubans
entered the United States without visas in the 2015 fiscal year (October
2014 to September 2015); that number was reached in just the first nine
months of the 2016 fiscal year. The 2015 mark was a 78 percent increase
over the previous year.14 The major reason for the sudden increase was that
Cubans feared diplomatic relations would lead the United States to repeal
the Cuban Adjustment Act.15
In 2013, the Cuban government abolished the need for an “exit” permit to
travel abroad and permitted most Cubans to obtain a passport. In addition, a
Cuban could leave the country for up to two years without losing citizenship
or property rights. This was a long-awaited and popular decision. Whether
or not a Cuban used the new freedom, the creation of the opportunity was
cathartic. Cuba is a large island, but many Cubans had felt island-bound or
trapped, which is common to inhabitants of any island after a while.
Some Cubans used their new passports to travel to countries—especially
Ecuador—that would permit entry without a visa. From there, they attempted
to go to the United States. The surge led Ecuador to close its doors to Cubans
in 2015 and other countries, such as Nicaragua, to deny thousands of migrants

the right to cross their borders, leaving the Cuban émigrés in limbo.
A Changing Cuban-American Community

At first, many in the US exile community did not learn English or try to as-
similate. They believed—or hoped—their stay in the United States would be
temporary.16 Even after fifteen years, some had not even purchased property
or applied for US citizenship because of their expectation that they would
be returning to Cuba. As a result, they were unable to vote in US elections.
In part, this explains why Cuban-Americans had not developed a traditional
lobbying group to represent their interests until 1981, when the Reagan ad-
ministration encouraged Jorge Mas Canosa to form the CANF.
But the Cuban exile community did not have only one set of interests
because it was not monolithic. A stereotypical passionate animus against
the Revolution and communism is far less evident among those who arrived
more recently. The newer émigrés also tended to come from different classes
than the earlier ones. For example, only 8 percent of the group that migrated
between 1959 and 1962 held jobs in Cuba that were classified as semi- or un-
skilled. In the 1994–1995 cohort, 41 percent were in that category. A remark-
able 97 percent of the exiles who arrived in the 1960s identified themselves
as “white” in the 1970 US Census.17
Newer arrivals also have been much more clearly driven by economic
rather than political motives. Exiles of the 1980s and 1990s tended to be peo-
ple who fled the island because they lacked economic opportunity or suffered
harsh conditions during the Special Period. These economic migrants had
grown up with and were educated by the Revolution. They have been more
likely to favor rapprochement between the United States and Cuba because
most still had close family members in Cuba with whom they wanted to stay
in contact. One consequence of this demographic change is that the newer
arrivals have been more comfortable voting for Democratic candidates who
espouse a liberal agenda and favor engagement with Cuba than Republicans
who tout traditional conservative values and favor maintaining sanctions.
In the 2012 election, President Obama won nearly 50 percent of Florida’s
Cuban-American vote.18
By the 1980s, the early arrivals had become firmly planted in the United
States. Most had settled in South Florida. (Today 68 percent of Cuban-Amer-
icans live in Florida.19) Their families included mature children and grand-
children who were US-born English speakers, well integrated into American
society. A sizable proportion of the first wave had worked for US companies
before the Revolution and were comfortable with US corporate practices and
248 Chapter 19
norms. Cuban exiles became among the first Latinos rising to national promi-
nence. Carlos Gutierrez, for example, was the chief executive of the Kellogg
cereal company and later secretary of commerce. Roberto C. Goizueta was
chairman of the board and CEO of Coca-Cola.
Yet the depiction of all Cuban-Americans as wealthy is belied by the fact
that 20 percent live in poverty. The poverty rate for all Americans is 16 per-
cent.20 With less desirable skill sets, later waves of émigrés tended to be less
prosperous than the first wave. Their lack of advancement, no doubt, has been
due also to discrimination they encountered from white America, as well as
from lighter-skinned exiles who came before them. Eckstein reports that “ear-
lier émigrés spoke to me disparagingly about Marielito language, dress, and
demeanor, and their ‘weird slang.’”21 In fact, Miami was a cauldron boiling
with racial hostility in the 1970s, as blacks watched white Cuban-Americans
gain positions of power and wealth while job opportunities for blacks de-
clined and their neighborhood schools deteriorated. In May 1980, the tension
erupted during three days of violence in black communities that left eighteen
people dead and property damage of more than $100 million.22
RACIAL INEQUALITY
After the Revolution and prior to the Special Period, historian Alejandro de
la Fuente asserts, “Cuban society had made remarkable progress in the reduc-
tion of racial inequality in a number of crucial areas, including education,
indicators of health care, and the occupational structure.” Racial disparities
still existed, he notes, “but the trend was unequivocally towards equality.”23
Then the Special Period intervened. The changes in Cuba’s economy under-
mined the advances, many of which had depended on government spending
that declined after 1990.
Darker-skinned Cubans also found fewer opportunities as market reforms
took hold. Foreign hotel owners and Cuban managers seemed to assume
that international tourists would prefer lighter-skinned service providers
such as waiters, which gave these Cubans greater access to hard-currency
tips.24 Moreover, darker-skinned Cubans received much less hard currency
from remittances. Black Cuban exiles tended to have less disposable in-
come to send to their relatives, and whites constituted the largest portion of
Cuban émigrés—68 percent of US Cuban Americans identified themselves
as “white” in 2004.25
Racial differences in income also resulted from historic disparities in edu-
cational attainment. To its credit, the revolutionary government had elimi-
nated the disparity between whites and blacks/mulattos in terms of university
graduation rates. In fact, a smaller percentage of whites graduated from

college in 1981 than blacks and mulattos. (In contrast, the US percentage of
white twenty-five-year-olds who had graduated from college was twice as
great as the black percentage in 1987.)26
However, the exclusion of darker-skinned Cubans continued to exist at the
best schools. For example, black and mulatto students make up only 3 percent
of the total at Havana’s Lenin School, Cuba’s most prestigious high school to
which adolescents are admitted after achieving the highest scores on a nation-
wide competitive exam. In a 1977 interview with then minister of education
José Ramón Fernández, Philip Brenner remarked that the admissions process
was likely to function against black youths. Their parents would have been
less well educated than whites before the Revolution, and so they would tend
not to have a home environment as oriented to professional achievement
as whites. Fernández dismissed the concern, arguing that his ministry was
overcoming the problem by setting aside 10 percent of the places in highly
competitive schools for darker-skinned applicants. But by the 1990s, the ef-
fect of such institutional racism was evident from the skin color of the best
trained doctors and skilled professionals who were able to supplement their
regular incomes with hard currency because the government had sent them
on missions abroad.
While “Cubans today are more than ever equal before the law,” social
scientist Esteban Morales observed in 2011, “we continue to be unequal in
racial terms, to grasp the opportunities that social policy itself puts at our
disposal.”27 In effect, those able to resolver successfully during the Special
Period tended to be lighter-skinned Cubans.
Even Fidel pointed to the widening gap between whites and blacks in a
September 2000 speech in New York City, and remorsefully said,
We believed at the beginning that when we established the fullest equality

before the law and complete intolerance for any demonstration of sexual dis-
crimination in the case of women, or racial discrimination in the case of ethnic
minorities, these phenomena would vanish from our society. It was some time
before we discovered that marginality and racial discrimination with it are not
something that one gets rid of with a law or even with ten laws.28
The speech was remarkable because Cuban officials had treated the open
discussion of race—or any issue that divided Cubans into socially constructed
categories—almost as if it were counterrevolutionary.
The “official silence” about racial inequality, de la Fuente argues, actually
“contributed to the survival, reproduction, and even creation of racist ideolo-
gies. . . . [Racist] discourse found fertile breeding ground in private spaces,
where race continued to influence social relations among friends, neighbors,
250 Chapter 19
co-workers, and family members.”29 However, Cuban leaders have countered

the taboo in the twenty-first century, as Fidel Castro’s 2000 speech suggests.
Notably, Raúl Castro acknowledged the persistence of racism during his
opening speech to the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in
April 2016. “The fight against any trace of racism that impedes or halts the
rise to leadership roles of Black and mixed race Cubans,” he declared,
must continue without respite. To consolidate the results in this important and
just policy of the Revolution, we must work systematically, with foresight and
intentionality. A matter of this importance cannot be at the mercy of spontaneity
or improvisation.30
Yet scholars are still unable to determine the extent of racial disparities
because the government does not collect the necessary data. For this reason,
Morales argues, a key step in overcoming racism in Cuba is to require that
official statistics “be gathered by color.” Even though all Cubans benefit from
an “extraordinarily humanitarian social policy,” he writes in a blog widely
read in Cuba, “we have historically different starting points, the experiences
from which are transmitted generation to generation, carrying with them a
colonial and neocolonial history of five hundred years.” He concludes that
“the only way to obliterate this complex reality is to base social policy on
inequalities that actually exist.”31
DIALOGUE
The absence of discussion in Cuba about institutional racism, and the

“silence” about the way darker-skinned Cubans suffer more than lighter-
skinned Cubans from the growing inequality on the island are akin to the
lack of meaningful dialogue between Cubans on the island and those in the
diaspora. Greater openness and dialogue about both issues would likely
benefit everyone.
As Morales recommends, a first step with regard to racism would be for the
government to gather the necessary data for analysis. It also should encourage
open debate of the subject and follow up with serious efforts at ameliora-
tion. Speaking from the audience in May 2009 at a conference sponsored
by Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Mariela Castro Espín criticized
use of the term “Afro-Cuban.” She argued that it embodies a redundancy,
because every Cuban has some African blood, every Cuban is of a mixed
race. But, she acknowledged, discrimination against Cubans with darker
skins exists in Cuba, which is a problem that needs solving without dividing
people into tribal-like categories. Her comments echoed those of Fidel Castro
in 1959, which we noted in chapter 8, when he emphasized the unity of all

Cubans and condemned discrimination “against a Cuban . . . over a matter
of lighter or darker skin.” The problem of racism in Cuba will not disappear
if the government tries to sweep it under the rug. It is more likely to emerge
with violence and anger if such a discussion is suppressed, which would not
benefit any Cuban.
Jorge Domínguez suggests that both Cuba and its diaspora would also ben-
efit from increased dialogue that would enable the country to involve émigrés
in its development. He argues that such a dialogue would need to occur within
the diaspora. In fact, the likelihood that diaspora Cubans will play a greater
role in Cuba’s future has been increased as a result of more family travel,
“thanks to the measures taken by the US government in 2009 and accepted
by the Cuban government,” Domínguez notes. This “has already generated
multiple dialogues within many Cuban families. These valuable dialogues
represent a breakthrough in communications.”32
NOTES
1. Recorded telephone interview with the authors, July 22, 2016.
2. José María Heredia, “Niágara” and “Himno del Desterrado,” in Poesias de
Don José Maria Heredia, 98–103, 156–60.
3. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 37.
4. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 37–38.
5. Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide, 15.
6. Gustavo N. López, “Hispanics of Cuban Origin in the United States, 2013”
(Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, September 2015), 1, http://www.pewhis
panic.org/2015/09/15/hispanics-of-cuban-origin-in-the-united-states-2013.
7. Susan Eckstein and Lorena Barberia, “Cuban Americans and Their Transna-
tional Ties,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip
8. Nelson Amaro and Alejandro Portes, “Una Sociologia del Exilio: Situación de
los Grupos Cubanos en Estados Unidos,” Aportes, no. 23 (January 1972): 13.
9. Associated Press, “Castro Tells Rally Cubans Are Free to Leave Country,” New
York Times, September 30, 1965, 1, 2.
10. Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 61–68.
11. The Cuban Adjustment Act, Public Law No. 89-732, November 2, 1966.
12. Eckstein and Barberia, “Cuban Americans and Their Transnational Ties,” 267.
13. Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants, 54.
14. Jens Manuel Krogstad, “Surge in Cuban Immigration to US Continues into
2016,” FacTank, Pew Research Center, August 5, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/
fact-tank/2016/08/05/cuban-immigration-to-u-s-surges-as-relations-warm.
252 Chapter 19
15. Fulton Armstrong, “US-Cuba: Migration Policy Growing Tortuous, Dangerous,”

AULA Blog, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, February 4, 2016, https://
aulablog.net/2016/02/04/u-s-cuba-migration-policy-growing-tortuous-dangerous.
16. Roberto González Echevarria, “Exiled by Ike, Saved by America,” New York
Times, January 7, 2011, A23.
17. Ecsktein, The Immigrant Divide, 16, 19.
18. Jens Manuel Krogstad, “After Decades of GOP Support, Cubans Shifting
toward the Democratic Party,” FacTank, Pew Research Center, June 24, 2014, http://
www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/24/after-decades-of-gop-support-cubans
-shifting-toward-the-democratic-party.
19. López, “Hispanics of Cuban Origin in the United States,” 2.
20. López, “Hispanics of Cuban Origin in the United States,” 2.
21. Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide, 27.
22. Steven A. Holmes, “Miami Melting Pot Proves Explosive,” New York Times,
December 9, 1990, E4.
23. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in
Cuba’s Special Period,” Socialism and Democracy 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 68.
24. De la Fuente, “Recreating Racism,” 77–79.
25. Pew Hispanic Center, “Cubans in the United States,” Fact Sheet, August 25,
2006, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2006/08/25/cubans-in-the-united-states.
26. De la Fuente, “Recreating Racism,” 69.
27. Esteban Morales, “Notas Sobre el Tema Racial en la Realidad Cubana de Hoy,”
Esteban Morales Domínguez Blog, September 2011 (authors’ translation), http://este
banmoralesdominguez.blogspot.ca/2011/09/notas-sobre-el-tema-racial-en-la.html.
28. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Cuban Solidarity Rally,” New York, September
8, 2000, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2000/ing/f080900i.html.
29. De la Fuente, “Recreating Racism,” 81.
30. Raúl Castro Ruz, “The development of the national economy, along with
the struggle for peace, and our ideological resolve, constitute the Party’s princi-
pal missions,” April 18, 2016 (Granma International translation), http://en.granma
.cu/cuba/2016-04-18/the-development-of-the-national-economy-along-with-the-strug
gle-for-peace-and-our-ideological-resolve-constitute-the-partys-principal-missions.
31. Morales, “Notas Sobre el Tema Racial en la Realidad Cubana de Hoy.”
32. Jorge I. Domínguez, “Dialogues within and between Cuba and Its Diaspora,”
in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed. Philip
Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Chapter 20
Helms-Burton, US-Cuban Relations,

and Terrorism, 1995–1998
Although US policies on Cuba mean relatively little in Washington, the

implications of even the most trivial policy have enormous impact on the
island. In Cuba, every nuance and component of US policy carries poten-
tially profound consequence. Indeed, for Cuba, US politics constitutes a
major determinant in the creation and implementation of both foreign and
domestic policy.
—Soraya M. Castro Mariño, Cuban political scientist1
HELMS-BURTON
At mid-decade, Cuba’s leaders finally were able to take a deep breath. With
two successive years of growth in the gross domestic product, the worst of
the early 1990s was over.2 US efforts to wreak havoc on the island had im-
miserated many, but the regime had survived. The revival emerged largely in
the service sector, as a result of increased tourism, and from more than two
hundred joint venture agreements with Western companies by 1995.
Cuba’s staying power frustrated anti-Castro hardliners in the United States.
They also feared that President Clinton’s advisers were pushing him to reduce
tensions with Cuba.3 National Security Council staffers Morton Halperin and
Richard Feinberg, in fact, had been advocates of improved relations with
Cuba before entering the Clinton administration. At the State Department,
Undersecretary for Political Affairs Peter Tarnoff had negotiated the 1994
migration accord that ended the “rafter” exodus by sending 25,000 Cubans to
Guantánamo Naval Base. Meanwhile, the Cuban government made it easier
for the United States to have further negotiations by releasing several promi-
nent political prisoners. In June 1995, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo made his peace
253
254 Chapter 20
with the Revolution. A founder of the counterrevolutionary terrorist organiza-

tion Alpha 66, Gutiérrez Menoyo had spent twenty-two years in Cuban jails.
However, the fortunes of the anti-Castroites also turned favorable at the start
of 1995. Republicans in Congress had gained House and Senate majorities in
the 1994 midterm elections, which made Jesse Helms (R-NC) the new chair
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Dan Burton, a right-wing Repub-
lican from Indiana, became chair of the House International Relations Com-
mittee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee. Cuban-Americans had donated
generously to both of their campaigns, and Burton’s first hearing as subcom-
mittee chair focused on Cuba. The star witness was Jorge Mas Canosa, leader
of the CANF, who proclaimed that “the Cuban-American community could
not have expected a dearer friend . . . to assume the chairmanship.”4
Helms recognized that the Cuban economy had begun to rise from its nadir
because of foreign investment, which then became the focus of his energies.
In February 1995, he and Burton sponsored bills in the Senate and House
titled “The Cuban Liberty and Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act,” aimed at dis-
couraging investment in Cuba and further limiting trade.
In presenting his version on the Senate floor, Helms made clear its intent—
the overthrow of the Cuban government. Yet he noted that he would allow
Cubans to decide “whether Castro leaves Cuba in a vertical or horizontal
position.” Otherwise, he gave them no choice, saying, “but he must and will
leave Cuba.”5 The lengthy and detailed measure, which became commonly
known as the Helms-Burton Act, read as if it were a formal indictment of the
Cuban government. The bill mandated that US sanctions could be lifted only
after Cubans elect a new government “democratically” and that it “does not
include Fidel Castro or Raúl Castro.”
Cuban political scientist Soraya Castro likened Helms-Burton to the 1901
Platt Amendment, writing that it would “bring Cuba back to the status it had
early in the twentieth century, when the United States dictated the destiny of
the Cuban nation.”6 Similarly, Harvard scholar Jorge Domínguez asserted that
the law “is quite faithful to the theme of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roo-
sevelt Corollary. It claims for the United States the unilateral right to decide
a wide array of domestic policies and arrangements in a nominally sovereign
post Castro Cuba.”7
The House and Senate versions of Helms-Burton were not identical, and
neither commanded an immediate majority in its respective chamber. Helms
and Burton were willing to bide their time, a Senate staffer told us in an
interview, hoping to pressure Democrats into supporting an amalgam of the
legislation during the 1996 presidential election year. They had little idea how
Cuban-American militants would enable the legislators to pass a law they
only dreamed might be possible.
Helms-Burton, US-Cuban Relations, and Terrorism, 1995–1998 255
CUBAN-AMERICAN MILITANTS TAKE CHARGE
New Immigration Policy Provokes Anti-Castro Hardliners

At the start of 1995, conditions at the Guantánamo Naval Base were bleak.
The Cuban detainees had few recreation facilities and their main food staple
was C-rations. Some had begun to mutilate themselves, “injecting diesel fuel
in their veins,” hoping to be sent to the United States for treatment.8 In April
1995, General John Sheehan, commander of the US Atlantic Command,
warned the White House that some Cubans were likely to stage riots on the
base during the summer months, when the temperature would rise past 120
degrees Fahrenheit, endangering both US soldiers and the refugees them-
selves.9 His warning propelled the administration into new talks with Cuba.
The Clinton administration needed a way out of a dilemma its September
rafters agreement had created. If the US government did nothing, it would
have to deal with a restive group of exiles who saw no end to their quasi-
imprisonment. Yet if Clinton permitted the Guantánamo Cubans to emigrate
to the United States, he would be encouraging a new wave of rafters who
believed they could reach their desired destination after suffering the naval
base conditions for only nine months.
So Clinton sent Tarnoff back to negotiate with Cuban National Assembly
President Ricardo Alarcón, first in New York and then in Toronto. The talks
were so secret that officials on the State Department’s Cuba desk were not
informed for fear they would try to scuttle the mission. The result was a
policy known as wet foot–dry foot. The Clinton administration announced
that it would admit most of the 25,000 Cubans housed at the naval base. But
to discourage future rafters, the US Coast Guard would thereafter return to
Cuba any migrants it intercepted at sea. (Those who managed to touch dry US
territory would continue to be classified as political refugees and given parole
status.) In turn, the Cuban government pledged it would take no punitive
actions against those whom the United States returned, and it would permit
US diplomats to make periodic visits anywhere in the country to ensure that
returning rafters were not punished.
Anti-Castro Cuban exiles and their allies in Congress responded to the
announcement with outrage. But José Basulto, a Bay of Pigs veteran who
had engaged in violent actions against Cuba in the 1960s, also was fed up
with the so-called Cuba Lobby in Washington. Traditional lobbying for new
laws was too slow and unreliable for him. Basulto had founded Brothers to
the Rescue, an organization that flew small planes over the Florida Straits
in search of Cuban rafters who needed assistance. While US media gener-
ally described Brothers as “humanitarian,” Basulto’s goal was to destabilize
Cuba. In frequent broadcasts on Radio Martí and Miami radio stations, he
256 Chapter 20
encouraged Cubans to leave the island, promising to find them and notify
the US Coast Guard to bring them to the United States. But that promise
was no longer viable after the September 1994 agreement required the
Coast Guard to send rafters to Guantánamo—and following the May 1995
agreement, back to Cuba.
Brothers to the Rescue Repeatedly Violates Cuban Airspace

In July 1995, Basulto found a new raison d’être for his organization: provok-
ing the Cuban government in the hope of derailing rapprochement. With a
Miami television cameraman on board, he flew low over the Malecon, Ha-
vana’s waterfront roadway, dropping religious medals and bumper stickers
along the route.10 The Malecon is lined with tourist hotels, apartment houses,
office buildings, and Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Relations. That evening, Mi-
ami’s NBC affiliate station aired film of the mission. On subsequent flights,
he dropped leaflets advocating that Cubans rise up against their government.
Cuban officials assert that Basulto’s planes made more than twenty-five such
flights, a claim the US State Department partially validated.11
Given Basulto’s background, Cuban security officials viewed the flights
as a serious threat. He had come to his “humanitarian” project late in life,
claiming he had converted to nonviolence after engaging in militant actions
for many years. After the Bay of Pigs invasion, he worked with the Central
Intelligence Agency on Operation Mongoose, but left the terrorist program
allegedly because he was frustrated by its slow pace. He then orchestrated
a spectacular raid on a Havana tourist hotel where he believed Fidel spent
his leisure time, firing scores of rounds at the building from small can-
nons.12 “We were pretty [lousy] terrorists,” he told the Washington Post in
1997, “because somebody else would have got explosive ammunition.” He
devoted the remainder of the 1960s to anti-Castro activities with violent
groups in South Florida, believing “that the only hope for the Cuban people
lay in the physical elimination of Fidel Castro.”13 In the 1980s, he again
worked with the CIA, training and helping the contras to launch terrorist
attacks against Nicaragua.14
The Cuban government protested Basulto’s flights officially to US au-
thorities on at least four occasions. It did so informally as well, once to Rep.
Bill Richardson (D-NM) and on another occasion to a group of former high-
ranking US military officers visiting Cuba. The group then reported to the
National Security Council staff that Cuba was likely to shoot at future flights
that violated Cuban airspace.15 From Cuba’s perspective, Basulto’s flights
were akin to Al Qaeda pilots flying over Washington and dropping innocuous
leaflets. The risk was too great that on a future flight Basulto might switch
from leaflets to bombs. Cuban exiles had done that before. Yet US officials
made minimal efforts to stop the flights. When asked by a radio interviewer
what pressure the US government had placed on him, Basulto joked that the
authorities had been “on vacation.”16
Cubans Shoot Down Two Planes

On February 24, 1996, he set out again, along with two other Brothers to
the Rescue Cessnas. The details about what happened during the flight are
still open to question. Basulto claims that none of the planes entered Cuban
airspace that afternoon. Cuba maintains that all three planes entered Cuban
airspace and were over its territorial waters when pilots flying Cuban MIGs
shot down two of them. US air traffic control tracking data indicates that
the two planes were over international waters at the time of the shootdown,
and that Basulto’s plane may have crossed into Cuban space. Four men were
killed. Basulto headed for clouds to evade the Cuban fighters and returned
safely to Florida.17 Cuba’s political leaders did not make the decision to shoot
down the planes lightly. They had allowed the incursions to go on for several
months, during which time they issued numerous warnings. But senior Cuban
military officers were pressing Fidel for some retaliatory action.
The Clinton administration reacted harshly, placing all of the blame on
Cuba. At the instigation of the United States, both the UN Security Council
and the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization deplored
Cuba’s action. Clinton condemned it “in the strongest possible terms” and
two days after the event announced retaliatory measures that tightened the
embargo, including the cancellation of direct charter flights between Miami
and Havana and new restrictions on the movements of Cuban diplomats
within the United States.
In the US Congress, the dynamics of the ongoing debate over versions of the
Helms-Burton bill took a dramatic turn. In the new atmosphere of increased
hostility toward Cuba, House-Senate conferees opted for the House version’s
more radical approach, which constrained the president’s prerogatives to
modify the embargo. Prior to the shootdown, the legislation had stalled in the
Senate and the Clinton administration had not proposed an alternative. Now
the president was confronted with three options in a year when he hoped to
win Florida’s electoral votes: (1) do nothing; (2) conduct a military strike
against Cuba; (3) sign the unsavory bill.18 Attorney General Janet Reno urged
Clinton to veto Helms-Burton, arguing that the law would place undesirable
limits on the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief.19 But
Clinton viewed signing the bill as the least worst option, and Helms-Burton
became law on March 12, 1996.
258 Chapter 20
The Least Worst Option

The measure codified existing executive orders that made up the US eco-
nomic embargo against Cuba. This seemed to mean that embargo modifica-
tions presidents previously could make at their sole discretion now would
require new congressional action. Helms-Burton also granted to US citizens
who had been Cuban citizens when the Cuban government nationalized
their property the right to have the US government advocate for their
claims. In addition, any claimant could sue a foreign company in a US court
for allegedly “trafficking” in stolen property. It was a significant departure
from accepted international law because it involves a US court in an extra-
territorial dispute, which some referred to as the “Bacardí provision.” Ba-
cardí, Ltd. lobbied for the measure, claiming its former distilleries in Cuba
were being used to manufacture Havana Club rum. Though the company
is headquartered in Bermuda, the family owners moved to Puerto Rico in
1960 and most members became US citizens. They hoped to sue Pernod, the
French distributor of Havana Club, which has assets in the United States.
However, the law also permits a president to waive the Bacardí provision,
and Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama invoked that
loophole consistently after 1996.
That autumn, the international community condemned the Helms-Burton
Act in a UN General Assembly vote of 138 to 3, with 24 abstentions. (In
2016, the General Assembly unanimously condemned the US embargo, with
the United States and Israel abstaining for the first time.) International busi-
nesses then voted with their money to defy Helms-Burton, increasing foreign
direct investment in Cuba by 22 percent from 1996 to 1997.20 The growth
of investment came in part as a result of new laws in 1995 by which Cuba
allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of an investment, with guar-
anteed protection against nationalization.
Congressional passage of the Helms-Burton Act was emblematic of the
decline in fortune and clout of CANF. The bill’s coauthor, Daniel Fisk, at the
time a Senate staffer who worked for Helms, reportedly did not even talk to
CANF officials before drafting the legislation.21 Helms sponsored the bill for
ideological reasons, but the CANF took credit in any case.
TERRORIST CAMPAIGN AGAINST CUBA
With Helms-Burton failing to deter new investors, a violent sector in the

anti-Castro exile community turned to terrorist strikes to scare off tourists.
The New York Times identified Luis Posada Carriles as the organizer of a se-
ries of 1997 bombings at major hotels in Havana and one popular restaurant,
Bodeguita del Medio, in which several people were injured and one Italian
tourist was killed.22
In 1998, Cuba invited FBI investigators to examine information that dem-
onstrated the attacks originated with anti-Castro groups in southern Florida.
The FBI found that the evidence also indicated CANF had supported some of
the terrorists.23 Yet the FBI did not arrest any of those involved in the bomb-
ing attacks. Instead, it used the information to identify and arrest fourteen
Cuban agents whom Cuba had sent to monitor the terrorist groups. Some
were deported; others confessed to minor crimes and were given short prison
terms. Five of the Cubans declared their innocence. As a result, Miami pros-
ecutors charged them with conspiracy to commit espionage and asked for
sentences ranging from fifteen years to two life sentences. Notably, the evi-
dence prosecutors offered against them validated the defendants’ claims that
they had conducted surveillance only on anti-Castro groups planning attacks
against Cuba. They became known as the “Cuban Five.”24
Posada had been linked to years of terrorist actions against Cuba, includ-
ing the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455. In 2000, he planned to
assassinate Fidel Castro in Panama by blowing up a car laden with dozens of
pounds of C-4 explosive. It was parked adjacent to a university auditorium
packed with students where the Cuban leader was speaking, when police
nabbed Posada and three accomplices. Convicted of “disturbing the peace,”
the four terrorists were pardoned by outgoing Panamanian president Mireya
Moscoso in 2004.
While the United States barred Posada from the entering the country be-
cause of his terrorist activities, he illegally found his way to Texas. After fed-
eral marshals captured him, prosecutors put him on trial merely for lying on
an immigration form. The jury members, seemingly intimidated by militant
Cuban-Americans in the audience who glowered at them throughout the trial,
decided that Posada was not guilty. He then moved to Miami, where local
politicians and anti-Castro Cuban-Americans feted him as a hero.25
Both Venezuela and Cuba have requested that the United States extradite
Posada to their countries. The requests have been denied. Yet Posada was not
the only anti-Cuban terrorist the United States has harbored. His alleged co-
planner of the Cubana bombing, Orlando Bosch, also had been barred from the
United States because, in the State Department’s judgment, he had a “criminal
history and involvement in terrorism.” Indeed, a House of Representatives
committee characterized Bosch as “the most aggressive and volatile of the
anti-Castro leaders,” and reported that he had organized more than eleven
bombing raids over Cuba in 1963 alone.26 After he entered the United States
illegally, President George H. W. Bush paroled him in 1990, against the Justice
Department’s recommendation. Once out of jail, Bosch publicly hailed the
260 Chapter 20
destruction of the Cuban airliner, saying, “It was a legitimate war action.
. . .We are at war, aren’t we?” Bosch, too, became a hero in Miami.27
Other Miami-based terrorists carried out attacks on Cuban targets
throughout the world. For example, two Cuban diplomats, Adriana Corcho
and Efren Monteagudo, were killed by a bomb in Lisbon in 1976. Omega
7, one of the major anti-Castro groups, claimed responsibility for the assas-
sination of Félix García Rodríguez on September 11, 1980. A member of
Cuba’s mission to the United Nations, he was the first UN diplomat to be
assassinated in New York City.28
The Cuban government has tended to link most terrorist acts to some US
government agency, whether or not there was evidence of direct US involve-
ment. For example, former general Fabián Escalante asserted in 2006 that
there had been more than six hundred attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro
sponsored by the United States.29 The United States has acknowledged only
eight attempts, and has not revealed any that may have occurred after 1966.30
It was in this context of terrorism that the Cuban government prevented
dissidents from holding a conference in February 1996, and sentenced sev-
eral of them to fourteen-month prison terms. The Clinton administration
had been disbursing modest payments to hundreds of Cubans who identi-
fied themselves as dissidents and had formed a coalition of 130 loosely
organized groups throughout the country. The groups had planned to meet
in Havana on February 22, 1996, under an umbrella organization named
Concilio Cubano. The United States also had urged the European Union
(EU) to condition aid to Cuba on its willingness to allow the coalition to be
placed under the EU’s protection.31
Cuban officials were troubled by Concilio’s conference precisely because
of the US connection. The meeting’s timing further heightened their sus-
picions. Brothers to the Rescue had issued a press release announcing that
its next flights over Havana would coincide with the gathering, and Cuban
security specialists viewed the Brothers’ prior missions as preparation for
a terrorist attack. With the experiences of US-sponsored terrorism inflating
their calculation of a threat, they imagined a worst-case scenario that linked
the meeting to the announced flights in a conflagration designed to pressure
President Clinton into taking aggressive action during an election year.
Instead of making Cuba more secure, though, the preventive measures
reinforced the country’s international image as a human rights offender. The
European Union held up aid to Cuba, the UN General Assembly condemned
the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes, and President Clinton felt
compelled to sign a toughened Helms-Burton bill into law.
NOTES
1. Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “Cuba-US Relations, 1989–2002: A View from

Havana,” in Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the “Special Period,”
ed. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2006), 305.
2. Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas (ONE), “Panorama Económica y Social,
Cuba 1996” (Havana: 1997)
3. Walt Vanderbush and Patrick J. Haney, “Policy toward Cuba in the Clinton
Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 114, no. 3 (Fall 1999).
4. Jorge Mas Canosa, “Statement,” in US Congress, House, 104th Cong., 1st
Sess., “Cuba and US Policy,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on the Western
Hemisphere, Committee on International Relations, February 23, 1995, 14.
5. Jesse Helms, “Remarks,” Congressional Record, February 9, 1995, S2411; 141
Cong. Rec. S 2399.
6. Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “US-Cuban Relations During the Clinton Adminis-
tration,” Latin American Perspectives 29, no. 4 (July 2002): 62.
7. Jorge I. Domínguez, “US-Cuban Relations: From the Cold War to the Colder
War,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 39, no. 3 (1997): 58.
8. Pentagon official quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 472.
9. Philip Brenner and Peter Kornbluh, “Clinton’s Cuba Calculus,” NACLA Report
on the Americas, September/October 1995.
10. Carl Nagin, “Backfire,” New Yorker, January 26, 1998, 32.
11. John M. Goshko, “Cuban Aide Defends Air Attack; Supporting Evidence Not
Presented to U.N.,” Washington Post, February 29, 1996, A16; Bradley Graham, “US
Tried to Restrain Group’s Flights,” Washington Post, February 27, 1996, A5.
12. Felix I. Rodriguez and John Weisman, Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1989), 109–11.
13. Jefferson Morley, “Shootdown,” Washington Post Magazine, May 25, 1997.
14. Mireya Navarro, “Nonviolence of Castro’s Foes Still Wears a Very Tough
Face,” New York Times, February 28, 1996, A1.
15. Nagin, “Backfire,” 32–33.
16. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 482; Wayne S. Smith, “The
US-Cuba Imbroglio: Anatomy of a Crisis,” International Policy Report, May 1996
(Washington, DC: Center for International Policy); Thomas W. Lippman and Guy
Gugliotta, “US Data Forced Cuba to Retreat on Shooting; Basulto Bragged of Buzz-
ing Havana Previously,” Washington Post, March 16, 1996, A19.
17. Morley, “Shootdown.”
18. Daniel W. Fisk, “Cuba in US Policy: An American Congressional Perspec-
tive,” in Canada, the US and Cuba: Helms-Burton and Its Aftermath, ed. Heather
Nicol (Kingston, Ontario: Centre for International Relations, Queen’s University,
1999), 34.
19. Vanderbush and Haney, “Policy toward Cuba in the Clinton Administration.”
20. Paolo Spadoni, Failed Sanctions: Why the US Embargo against Cuba Could
Never Work (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 63–64.
262 Chapter 20
21. Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in
US Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban American National Foundation.” Interna-
tional Studies Quarterly 43 (June 1999).
22. Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rohter, “Life in the Shadows, Trying to Bring
Down Castro,” New York Times, July 13, 1998; Juan Tamayo, “Exiles Directed
Blasts That Rocked Island’s Tourism, Investigation Reveals,” Miami Herald, No-
vember 17, 1997.
23. Sánchez-Parodi, CUBA-USA, 209–10.
24. Landau, “The Cuban Five and the US War against Terror,” 274–76.
25. Landau, “The Cuban Five and the US War against Terror,” 273; Glenn Garvin,
“Panama: Exile Says Aim Was Castro Hit,” Miami Herald, January 13, 2001; Ann
Louise Bardach, “Twilight of the Assassins,” Atlantic, November 2006.
26. US Congress, House Select Committee on Assassination, “Investigation of the
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” 90–91.
27. Quoted in Andres Oppenheimer, Castro’s Final Hour: The Secret Story
behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1992), 325–26; US Department of Justice, Office of the Associate Attorney Gen-
eral, “Exclusion Proceeding for Orlando Bosch Avila,” File: A28 851 622, A11 861
810, January 23, 1989.
28. Robert D. McFadden, “Cuban Attaché at U.N. Is Slain from Ambush on
Queens Road,” New York Times, September 12, 1980, A1.
29. Fabián Escalante Font, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro (Mel-
bourne: Ocean Press, 2006).
30. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Inspector General Report on Plots to Assas-
sinate Fidel Castro,” May 23, 1967.
31. Morris H. Morley and Chris McGillion, Unfinished Business: America and
Cuba After the Cold War, 1989–2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 96.
Chapter 21
The Pope Goes to Cuba;

Elián Goes to Miami, 1998–2000
Figure 21.1. In the spring

of 2000, Cuban children
were asked to write letters
to President Clinton
asking him to return Elián
González to Cuba. Eight-
year-old Teresa García
wrote this letter. Translation:
President Clinton: Please,
return little Elián Gónzales
[sic] to Cuba. The whole
country of Cuba asks you to
do this. Do not be unjust,
because Elián is from Cuba.
Everyone is waiting for him.
We are making this demand
because we do not want the
United States to hold onto
a child who was not born
there. And he was not born
in the US where drugs are
sold, even guns are sold
in stores, and children kill
their classmates in school.
Elián belongs to Cuba and
his family is in Cuba. Name:
Teresa J. García Castro
263
264 Chapter 21
POPE JOHN PAUL II VISITS CUBA
In the mid-1980s, Fidel Castro began trying to improve the government’s

quarter-century-long hostile relationship with the Catholic Church, which
had turned against the Revolution in 1959. The move was partly defensive,
prompted by the role Pope John Paul II was playing in strengthening anti-
communist movements in Eastern Europe. It also was a way to improve
relations with countries in Latin America. Ultimately, it was an acknowledg-
ment that the Cuban Catholic Church could play a positive role in the future
development of the country.
The first major opening took the form of a twenty-three-hour interview in
May 1985 with Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar who was deeply com-
mitted to liberation theology and had been working with “base communities.”
Near the end of the interview, the friar broached the subject of whether Marx-
ism—which he characterized as class hatred—was incompatible with religious
belief. The Cuban leader answered: “We who are revolutionaries, socialists
and Marxist-Leninists don’t preach hatred as a philosophy. . . . What we are
preaching is the repudiation, rejection and hatred of the [capitalist] system—
hatred of injustice. . . . I don’t think there is any contradiction with Christian
teachings, because, if somebody says ‘I hate crime’ or ‘I hate injustice, abuses
and exploitation,’ I don’t think that would be against Christian teachings.”1
Soon afterward, the government established an Office of Religious Affairs
to serve as a direct liaison to all religious organizations in the country. In
1990, the government permitted the Church to broadcast Easter and Christ-
mas services on the radio, and in 1991, the Cuban Communist Party allowed
religious adherents to become party members. This led to a 1992 revision of
the Cuban constitution, which declared that the nature of the state, which had
been until then atheist, was now secular.
Fidel’s 1988 invitation to Pope John Paul II to visit the country had gone
unanswered. But after the Cuban leader delivered it in person at the Vatican in
1996, and Cuba reinstated Christmas as a national holiday, the Pope decided
to make the journey in January 1998. Castro welcomed him at the airport,
along with the members of the powerful Political Bureau of the PCC (see
Fidel welcoming him in figure 21.2). On the street, crowds greeted the pontiff
with unvarnished enthusiasm. Signs in windows of homes declared, No tengo
miedo—“I am not afraid.”
More than one million people attended a public mass that John Paul II
led in Havana’s Revolution Square on January 25, 1998, his first stop of the
five-day visit. His message to those assembled offered a kind of vindica-
tion for Cuba’s leaders: “For many of the political and economic systems
The Pope Goes to Cuba; Elián Goes to Miami, 1998–2000 265
Figure 21.2. Fidel Castro greets Pope John Paul II in Havana, January 25, 1998. Photo
by Ahmed Velázquez, courtesy of Granma.
operative today, the greatest challenge is still that of combining freedom

and social justice.”2
He continued with this theme in a series of masses across the island, during
which the leader of the Roman Catholic Church found common ground with
Cuba’s leader by sharply rebuking global capitalism’s “blind market forces.”
He also pointedly called for an end to the US embargo, which he character-
ized as “oppressive economic measures imposed from outside the country.”3
Cuba reacted to the Pope’s plea for greater freedom by releasing more than
three hundred political prisoners, relaxing travel restrictions on priests, and
permitting more Church radio broadcasts.
US OPPONENTS OF RAPPROCHEMENT LOSE STRENGTH
Clinton Relaxes the Embargo

The Pope’s visit also reverberated in the United States, where the Clinton
administration found itself under increasing international pressure to dimin-
ish US hostility toward Cuba. Several South American countries had signed
trade pacts with Cuba, and Caribbean countries gave Castro a hero’s welcome
at a summit in which the region’s leaders signed a free-trade agreement.4
266 Chapter 21
Publicity generated by the pontiff’s trip and the Cuban government’s re-
sponses added to the pressure.
Clinton responded with modest changes that did little more than reverse
some earlier moves tightening the embargo. Direct charter flights between
the United States and Cuba were restored, and Cuban-Americans again were
allowed to send remittances up to $300 every three months to their families.
Yet a new dynamic between opponents and advocates of a changed re-
lationship began to emerge in 1998. The death in November 1997 of Jorge
Mas Canosa, the politically sophisticated head of the vaunted CANF, led
to fissures and cracks in the seemingly invincible influence of the hardline
anti-Castro lobby. Its legitimacy in Washington was also eroded by de-
tailed reports in the New York Times and Knight Ridder news service about
CANF’s links to terrorist attacks in Havana and assassination attempts
against Fidel Castro.5
At the same time, the Cuban exile community was going through genera-
tional changes and shifts in leadership. Mas Canosa’s power base had been
with the Republican Party, but now wealthy Cuban-American Democrats had
gained greater favor with Clinton’s political advisers inside the White House.6
In addition, younger Cuban-Americans, especially those born in the United
States, did not share the hope for revenge many of their parents harbored. An
increasing number favored a dialogue with Cuba, and, along with business,
church, and academic groups, they became more vocal in 1998.
In October 1998, a bipartisan call for change in policy came from an un-
likely group of former US officials that included Republican Secretaries of
State Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, and Lawrence Eagleburger. They
asked President Clinton to establish a commission to provide a broad review
of US relations with Cuba. But that was a step too far for the president. Anti-
Castro Cuban-Americans warned Vice President Al Gore that his 2000 presi-
dential bid would suffer from a Cuba policy review, especially among voters
in the key swing state of Florida. Then Representative Robert Menendez
(D-NJ) reportedly told Gore that if the policy review went forward, it would
be known as the “Gore Commission.”7
In rejecting the proposed bipartisan commission, Clinton also sought
to mollify its advocates in January 1999 by announcing a series of new
regulations that seemed to undercut the Helms-Burton law. The regulations
themselves were small but nonetheless significant for two reasons. First,
Clinton made the changes unilaterally, without any demand that the Cuban
government meet conditions or reciprocate, and he thus abandoned the prior
approach, called “calibrated response.”8 He would justify US actions toward
Cuba on the basis of US interests, not Cuban behavior.
Second, the new regulations went beyond what analysts said would be
possible under the Helms-Burton Act, which seemed to limit presidential dis-
cretion in implementing the embargo. When asked whether the changes were
consistent with the law, a senior National Security Council official asserted
publicly that “Helms-Burton codified the embargo and at the same time, it
codified the President’s licensing power. That is, it codified a process by
which there was an embargo to which exceptions could be granted on a case-
by-case basis by the President.”9 That interpretation opened the door virtually
to any license for trade with Cuba that a president would wish to make.
The new rules expanded who could send remittances to Cuba. For the
first time, any US citizen would be allowed to send up to $300 every quar-
ter to a Cuban family. Nongovernmental organizations, such as educational
foundations, would be allowed to send larger sums to “independent” orga-
nizations in Cuba. At the same time, the Treasury Department’s Office of
Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was ordered to further streamline licensing
procedures for US and Cuban citizens traveling between the two countries
and allow group licenses for the purpose of educational, cultural, humani-
tarian, religious, journalistic, and athletic exchanges, or what were called
“people-to-people” exchanges.
Baseball Diplomacy
Baseball truly is an American pastime—in Cuba and in the United States.
This provided the inspiration for Scott Armstrong and Saul Landau to propose
an intriguing opportunity to Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles,
to play a major role in a baseball diplomacy initiative with Cuba. The idea
had been batted around for twenty years, ever since South Dakota Democratic
Senators George McGovern and James Abourezk suggested it after traveling
to Cuba in 1977 with the University of South Dakota basketball team. But
Armstrong and Landau faced insurmountable obstacles in their new effort
until Clinton announced the January 1999 changes.
While the president authorized OFAC to issue a license to the Orioles to
travel to Cuba as a result of Armstrong and Landau’s behind-the-scenes urging,
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright added a troubling proviso to Clinton’s
announcement of the decision. Any profits from the games, she said, would
need to be distributed to the Cuban people through Caritas, the Cuban Catho-
lic charitable organization. She did not want to signal that the games would
lead to a warming of relations between the two countries, as so-called Ping-
Pong diplomacy led to improved ties between China and the United States.
Cuba viewed the secretary’s remarks to mean that the baseball games had
268 Chapter 21
become part of the US “people-to-people” campaign, which they well re-

membered Congressman Torricelli devising in 1992 as a subversive tactic
to sow seeds of discontent in the country. Her demand almost scuttled the
initiative. After two months of negotiations, and a last-minute 3:00 a.m. call
to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, negotiators resolved the problem
when they realized that the two exhibition games were unlikely to generate
any profits.10 The Orioles flew to Havana for the first game on March 28,
1999, and Cuba’s All-Star team played in Baltimore on May 3.
ELIÁN AND THE FUTURE OF CUBA
On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a fisherman found five-year-old Elián González

clinging to an inner tube in the ocean near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His
mother, Elizabet González, her boyfriend, and eight others had died when
their makeshift raft overturned during their ill-fated trip across the Florida
Straits. Rushed to a hospital, the young boy had survived in remarkably good
condition. But soon Elián was nearly torn apart as he became a symbol of
who would control Cuba’s future: Florida’s anti-Castro Cuban-American
community or Cubans on the island.
By all accounts, Elián’s first five years were relatively comfortable.
Though his parents had divorced, they shared custody and responsibility for
Elián, who was also close to his four grandparents. Juan Miguel González,
Elián’s father, had remarried, and his mother lived nearby with her boyfriend.
Both parents worked in the tourist industry in Varadero, a resort area close to
their small town of Cárdenas, about ninety miles east of Havana.
When Elián was released from the hospital, the US Immigration and Natu-
ralization Service turned him over to his father’s uncle, Lázaro, a frequently
unemployed laborer whose children had a history of trouble with the police.
Though Lázaro and his family had not maintained contact with Elián’s father,
they quickly claimed custody of the boy and demanded the US government
grant him parole as a political refugee. CANF then led a campaign to shower
the family with money, to buy presents for Elián, to pay for a dazzling birth-
day trip to Disney World in early December, and to demand that the boy not
be repatriated to Cuba. Meanwhile, at the request of Juan Miguel, the Cuban
government on November 29 demanded that the United States return Elián
to his father.
International covenants favored the claims of the father, but the Clinton
administration moved slowly to recover the boy from the custody of his
Miami relatives. On the island, his case became a cause célèbre. Regular
demonstrations were held across Cuba, billboards demanded that the United
States “send Elián home,” and schoolchildren wrote heartfelt letters appeal-
ing to President Clinton, such as the one that opens this chapter.
In March 2000, a federal judge ruled that Elián should live with his father,
who had come to the United States to retrieve him while they waited for a
court to decide whether the boy should be repatriated to Cuba. But the Miami
relatives refused to give him up, until federal agents—in a dramatic break-in
at Lázaro’s home in April—seized Elián at gunpoint (see Elián reunited with
his father in figure 21.3). Even then, court battles and delays kept the boy
from returning to Cuba with his father until June 28, 2000.
Figure 21.3. Elián González is reunited with his father, April 22,
2000. Photo by David Burnett.
270 Chapter 21
Puentes Cubanos
Founded in 1999 by Silvia Wilhelm,

Puentes Cubanos (Cuban Bridges) is a
nongovernmental organization that has
been dedicated to promoting normal rela-
tions between Cuba and the United States
by breaking down barriers—political, cul-
tural, linguistic, economic, and psycho-
logical—between Cubans on the island
and in the United States. It was a major
voice that opposed the severe restrictions
President George W. Bush placed on
Cuban-American travel in 2004.
Figure 21.4. Silvia Wilhelm
The case put a human face on the abstract debates about US policy toward
Cuba. US public sentiment overwhelmingly viewed the boy’s father sympathet-
ically, believed Elián should be reunited with his family in Cuba, and opposed
the Miami zealots. As a result, the saga further discredited the anti-Castro lobby
and made legislators even less wary about voting to ease sanctions against
Cuba.11 And they were being given several opportunities to do so.
Missouri’s archconservative Republican senator, John Ashcroft, was fac-
ing a tough reelection fight. In a move to support his state’s agriculture in-
dustry, he sponsored a farm bill amendment that would have lifted sanctions
on the sale of food and medicine to Cuba. The Ashcroft amendment also
blocked future presidential decisions from imposing unilateral agricultural
or medical sanctions against any foreign country. But despite considerable
support from other Republican senators, the measure failed in a House-
Senate conference committee.
This led Representative George R. Nethercutt (R-WA) to offer a less ambi-
tious version of the Ashcroft amendment in the House Appropriations Com-
mittee, which approved it in the spring of 2000. Nethercutt, who represented
a farm district, expressed the rationale of other Republicans in supporting the
legislation: “I need to stand up for the farmers in my district,” he declared.12
With US policy toward Cuba reframed to focus on trade instead of national
security or ethnic politics, legislators had found a noncontroversial way to
chip away at the embargo that Helms-Burton had codified.
The final version of the Nethercutt amendment required Cuba to pay for any
products in advance and in cash, and it prohibited US entities from extending
credit to Cuba for the sale of food and medicine. But it did permit food export-
ers to travel to Cuba under a general license. The measure was approved as part
of the 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act (TSRA).
Thus as the new millennium began, Congress appeared to have liberated
itself from the hardline anti-Castro lobby. It seemed that US-Cuban relations
might finally be headed toward a modus vivendi that would end forty years
of hostile relations between the two neighbors.
NOTES
1. Betto, Fidel and Religion, 317–18.

2. Larry Rohter, “Pope Asks Cubans to Seek New Path toward Freedom,” New
York Times, January 26, 1998.
3. S. Fainaru, “In Cuba, Awe and Exhilaration,” Boston Globe, January 26, 1998, A1.
4. Philip Brenner, Patrick J. Haney, and Walt Vanderbush, “The Confluence of
Domestic and International Interests: US Policy Toward Cuba, 1998–2001,” Interna-
tional Studies Perspectives, no. 3 (2002): 202.
5. Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rohter, “A Plot on Castro Spotlights a Powerful
Group of Exiles,” New York Times, May 5, 1998; Tamayo, “Exiles Directed Blasts
That Rocked Island’s Tourism, Investigation Reveals”; Ann Louise Bardach and
Larry Rohter, “A Bomber’s Tale: A Cuban Exile Details the ‘Horrendous Matter’ of a
Bombing Campaign,” New York Times, July 12, 1998.
6. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 498–500.
7. R. Ferreira and R. Fabricio, “Graham y Gore Convencieron al Presidente,” El
Nuevo Herald, January 10, 1999.
8. Philip Brenner, “Washington Loosens the Knot (a Little Bit),” NACLA Report
on the Americas, March/April 1999.
9. James Dobbins, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for
Inter-American Affairs, NSC, “On-the-record briefing on Cuba,” Released by the Of-
fice of the Spokesman, US Department of State, January 5, 1999.
10. Paula Pettavino and Philip Brenner, “More Than Just a Game: The Dual De-
velopmental Aspects of Cuban Sports,” Peace Review 11, no. 4 (December 1999).
11. Karen DeYoung, “Can Elián Case Alter US-Cuban Dynamic? Custody Fight
Renews Debate on Relations,” Washington Post, May 2, 2000, A4.
12. Quoted in Karen DeYoung and Eric Pianin, “Congressional Mood Shifts on
Cuba Trade Ban,” Washington Post, May 23, 2000, A1.
Chapter 22
The Search for a

Viable Strategy, 2001–2006
The loss of values is something very common today in the world, not only
in Cuba, and I didn’t want my film to be a story of degradation of mar-
ginal characters. They are two college students who love each other, had a
house, a workplace and were not in discrepancy with the law. Supposedly,
they had it all, but they were living in a place where that was not enough,
and were compelled to become the most wanted, as Bonnie and Clyde, but
without actually killing anyone, or steal big things. That is, to have a full
life, they must find some solutions not entirely positive. My main intention
was to say that in this place, to survive, to be an exemplary family they had
to lie and do certain prosecutable things because the sugar mill, what gave
them a spiritual and material life, had been stopped.
—Carlos Lechuga, discussing Melaza, a 2012 film he directed1
HOPES AND REALITIES IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
Hope Rests on Weak Pillars

As the new millennium opened, Cuban leaders were more hopeful about the
future than they had been for some time. They had weathered the collapse of
the Soviet Union and its socialist trading bloc, which had accounted for more
than 85 percent of Cuba’s foreign commerce in the 1980s. Economic reforms
had enabled the country’s gross domestic output to register steady growth,
though it was not yet back to its 1989 level. Relations with the United States
had improved, despite Helms-Burton, and the US Congress had passed legis-
lation in 2000 that could allow more trade. A new generation of leaders, who
took inspiration from the Cuban revolution, was emerging in Latin America.
272
The Search for a Viable Strategy, 2001–2006 273
But the reality was not nearly as bright as their hopes. Food production and
distribution remained a serious concern. From 2001 to 2005, a series of hur-
ricanes menaced the island. Food crops and poultry production were hit espe-
cially hard by Hurricane Dennis in July 2005. But the real problem, as econo-
mist Jorge Mario Sánchez emphasizes, was that a country with 40 percent of
its arable land left idle was importing an unsustainable $1.5 billion worth of
food annually, due to a “lack of incentives” and “bureaucratic restraints.”2
The economic turnaround in the 1990s had rested on three problematic
pillars: tourism, remittances, and two export commodities, nickel and sugar.3
Leading Cuban economists had been advocating, instead, that the country
needed to focus its resources on the Revolution’s two major achievements,
health care and education. They urged Cuba’s leaders to make the country
more hospitable to foreign investment, especially in knowledge-based sectors
such as pharmaceuticals and computer software, which would enable Cuba
to build lucrative niches in the global economy, generate surplus capital, and
diversify itself for sustainable growth.4 In 2003, services made up two-thirds
of the country’s GDP, which meant that Cuba increasingly depended on im-
ports for many goods.
Recall from chapter 18 that tourism was a weak pillar, because it did not
generate enough net hard currency and depended on the whims of consumers
in wealthy countries. Perhaps even worse, the tourist industry reduced the
incentive for young Cubans to advance their education. A taxi driver with
no more than a high school education could earn a monthly salary that was
roughly five times greater than a university-trained chemist. Remittances
from families abroad—mostly those living in the United States—came with
two problems. First, they were vulnerable to US policy changes—President
Clinton had stopped their flow in 1994. Second, they already were generating
inequalities, as we observed in chapter 19.
Thanks in part to investments made by Canada’s Sherritt International
conglomerate, Cuba was the world’s sixth largest producer of nickel in 2003.5
But the United States had set back Sherritt’s plans by applying Helms-Burton
Act restrictions against it. Other investors shied away because they expected
the price of nickel not to rise sufficiently to warrant their investment. While
China did invest $1 billion to modernize Cuba’s nickel operations, it drove
a tough bargain. China required that it recoup the full cost of capital invest-
ment in the mining industry before Cuba could begin sharing 50 percent of
production income.
Meanwhile, sugar production had become so unprofitable that the cost
to cultivate, harvest, mill, and ship the sweetener was greater than earnings
from its sales. In 2002, Cuba did the unthinkable. The country that had been
Sugar King announced it would close down more than half of its sugar mills
274 Chapter 22
and switch cane fields to other agricultural purposes. The decision came af-
ter more than a decade of declining sugar production and had been delayed
largely to avoid the displacement of rural families and communities. But
the state could no longer afford what had in effect become a large subsidy.
Between 1989 and 2002, sugar production fell by 56 percent, Cuba’s rank
among sugar-producing countries declined from third to tenth place, and the
world price for sugar dropped from thirteen cents to six cents per pound. Fidel
said that just the first year’s savings from downsizing would be $200 million.6
The Urgency for Reform

Cuba’s fundamental economic problems were no match for the modest mar-
ket reforms introduced in the 1990s that had led to the creation of paladares
and other self-employed businesses. While cuentapropistas cushioned some
discontent and provided wealth for a few enterprising entrepreneurs, the high
taxes and elaborate licensing procedures discouraged many potential small
business owners. For example, the license for a private home to operate as a
guest house required the owner to pay a tax rate of 70 percent on estimated
revenues, not actual income. If such a casa particular had a bad month, the
owner might pay more tax than the business actually earned. Such confisca-
tory taxation reduced the incentive to create small businesses, or it encour-
aged illegal behavior in the form of not registering for a license.
In addition, cuentapropistas could employ only family members, which
reduced the ability of small private businesses to generate jobs. They em-
ployed only half a million people by 2003. In addition, the government began
to discourage their growth once the worst of the Special Period ended. By
December 2003, the number of active licenses was down to 151,000, and ten
months later, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security cut the number of
self-employment categories from 158 to 118.7
The urgency for reform was evident beyond the economic spreadsheets.
We detected a palpable discontent—a lack of hope about the future—among
Cuba’s youth. In part this was due to increased unemployment and underem-
ployment, to the fatigue of listening to long speeches laden with promises that
would go unfulfilled, and to a focus on individual gratification that had not
been socially acceptable before the Special Period.
During a trip to Cuba by Philip Brenner at about this time, a twenty-year-
old woman engaged him in a conversation as he walked along the Malecon
on a windy winter day. She was dressed in a worn bomber-style leather jacket,
a sweatshirt, and loose fitting jeans—not the style of a typical prostitute. In
fact, what she was offering was conversation in return for some coffee and
ice cream at a café for tourists. After high school, he learned, she had studied
for a job in the hospitality industry and was working as a waitress, where she
could earn a modest amount of hard currency. At one point Brenner asked
her what she would say to President Castro if the Cuban leader gave her the
chance for one wish. Without hesitation she answered, “I’d ask him for a
passport to leave the country.”
Corruption
Consequences of the widespread discontent were an increase in petty theft,
a disregard for rules, and the appropriation of public goods for private pur-
poses. In short, corruption became a part of daily life throughout the country.8
Battle of Ideas
Beginning in 2000, Fidel Castro sought to counter the population’s alienation

with a multifaceted effort aimed at reinvigorating revolutionary enthusiasm.
Called the Battle of Ideas, the effort grew out of weekly patriotic rallies through-
out the island in support of Elián González’s return. Each of the “Saturday speak-
outs,” journalist Marc Frank reports, “was televised to the nation . . . the crowds
waving little Cuban flags on sticks as they were entertained by local talent.” It
soon became a movement, headquartered in an office adjacent to the Cuban
president’s, aimed at Cuba’s disaffected youth. As at the start of the Revolution,
young Cubans were sent out with an idealistic mission, “to become teachers,
health care providers, and social workers.” Castro intended the young recruits
to serve as “battering rams against creeping corruption.”*
In 2003, an additional forum made its debut. Mesa Redonda (“Roundtable”),
a two-hour weekly television program, often served as a propaganda platform.
But it also aired open debates about controversial subjects and became a
venue for serious discussions of proposed reforms. Mesa Redonda continues
today under the banner of a state-sponsored media outlet, CubaDebate.
Castro viewed the Battle of Ideas as essential for Cuba’s security. In 2003,
he declared:
The decadent imperialist capitalist system in its phase of neoliberal globalization

can no longer offer any solutions for the huge problems facing humanity. . . . That
system has no future. It is destroying nature and expanding hunger. . . . In the face
of political threats and aggression from abroad . . . we are profoundly studying and
increasingly perfecting our concepts of the war of all the people, for we know that
no technology, no matter how sophisticated, can ever defeat man. The battle of
ideas, our most powerful political weapon, will not let up for a minute.†
* Marc Frank, Havana Revelations: Between the Scenes in Havana (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2013), 37, 39.
† Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech on the Current World Crisis,” Havana, March 6, 2003, http://www
.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2003/ing/f060303i.html.
276 Chapter 22
An “informal economy” or black market—the sale or exchange of goods

and services without a government license or the government’s knowledge—
is common in most third world countries. But it had not been common in
Cuba until the Special Period. By 2000, as nearly every Cuban participated in
the black market for some household necessity, the petty illegalities corroded
the sense of community the Revolution had developed. Cubans looked out
for their own families and immediate friends, even if that meant undermining
the common good, which many believed no longer existed as they watched
inequality escalate.
Privatization added to the problem. Opening a private restaurant or guest-
house meant acquiring capital to renovate rooms and purchase goods. Some
Cubans obtained the money from relatives abroad. Others stole resources
from the government—construction materials, flour, tools, spare tires—and
sold the booty on the black market. Theft became so integral to the way of
life for some that it shaped how they made decisions about where to work.
A study by Hope Bastion Martinez found that access to hard currency in a
job was less important for some workers than the ability to pilfer goods they
could sell or barter.9
Protest Music
In the 1990s, Cuban hip-hop music became the outlet for youth protest (see
one such hip-hop group in figure 22.1). “Young, mostly black Cuban men
adopted the genre,” Margot Olavarria explains, “first by imitating it and even-
tually infusing it with their own roots and reality, transforming it into a space
for self-expression.” She notes that “while not all rap is politically charged,”
the government still censored it initially. But its widespread popularity forced
official acceptance, and Cuban hip-hop artists now travel internationally and
are regular participants at public music festivals. As Cuban hip-hop evolved
independently of US influence, its lyrics and themes became a distinctive
contrast to the American genre. Instead of promoting sexual exploitation and
consumption, Cuban artists focused on the problems of daily life. The music
provided a way for the generation of the 1980s and 1990s “to speak out about
racism, prostitution, police harassment, growing class differences, the dif-
ficulty of daily survival, and other social problems of contemporary Cuba.”10
Americans may know the stirring folk songs of Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo
Milanés, who were leading artists in the nueva trova (new folk music) move-
ment of the 1960s. Cubans in the new millennium favored more critical sing-
ers such as Carlos Varela. Many of his songs went right to the edge of what
censors would allow and became wildly popular. Consider “William Tell,”
which recounts the famous story from the perspective of the archer’s son.
Figure 22.1. Cuban hip-hop group Anónimos Consejos (Anonymous Advice), in a

makeshift studio, works on an album that protests increasing racism. Photo from video,
Changing Cuba, produced and reported by Peter Eisner for World Focus, https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=IDvENDarA3c.
Tired of holding the apple on his head, the boy runs away. William Tell cannot
understand why his son would abandon him, so the singer explains: “William
Tell, your son has grown up / And now he wants to shoot the arrow himself.”
In short, despite the superficial appearance of a successful rebound, at the
start of the millennium there was a broad consensus on the island that Cuba
needed a new economic strategy, one that would engender development and
enable it to maintain the Revolution’s commitment to equity. But there was
no successful model on which to base the desired strategy.
278 Chapter 22
“William Tell” by Carlos Varela
William Tell didn’t understand his son

Who one day got tired of having the apple placed on his head,
And started to run away.
His father cursed him—
How could he now prove his skill?
William Tell, your son has grown up,
And now he wants to shoot the arrow himself.
It’s his turn now to show his valor with your crossbow.
Yet William Tell did not understand the challenge:
Who would ever risk having the arrow shot at them?
He became afraid when his son addressed him,
Telling William that it was now his turn
To place the apple on his own head.
William Tell was angry at the new idea,
And refused to place the apple on his own head.
It was not that he didn’t trust his son—
But what would happen if he missed?
William Tell failed to understand his son—
Who one day got tired of having the apple placed on his head.
The model that Western advanced industrial nations advocated—the so-

called Washington Consensus—had lost its credibility. Argentina, which ac-
cepted the strictures of the Washington Consensus in the early 1990s and had
become its poster child, was experiencing an economic collapse at the start
of the new century. Even the scholar who coined the term for the export-led
privatizing model acknowledged it was a prescription only for macroeco-
nomic growth, not equity.11
Other Latin American countries had reduced their poverty rates, yet the
region’s total number of poor people was climbing and the gaps between
rich and poor were still the world’s largest. China had made enormous
leaps in its overall growth rate, but it had large areas where people re-
mained ill-fed and its gains came partly from exploitative sweatshops with
horrific working conditions. Vietnam’s seemingly miraculous recovery had
similar problems.
UNITED STATES AND EUROPE PRESSURE CUBA
Changes in Washington
Adding to Cuba’s problems, it faced a Republican administration in Wash-
ington that owed its electoral victory to hardline Cuban-Americans. On
November 22, 2000, the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board stopped its
hand count of 10,750 votes that machines had not recorded because a group
of Cuban-Americans menacingly demonstrated outside the building where
the board was meeting. A full tally likely would have provided Vice Presi-
dent Al Gore with a sufficient majority to win Florida’s electoral votes and
the presidency. The moblike rally added to other favors, such as campaign
contributions, that George W. Bush needed to repay to the anti-Castro Cuban-
American community.12
Surprisingly, the Bush administration’s Cuba policy in its first year was
distinguished more by continuity than change. The president continued the
practice of waiving implementation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act,
which otherwise would allow US citizens to sue in US federal courts persons
who “traffic in property confiscated in Cuba.” In November 2001, in the wake
of Hurricane Michelle’s devastation of the island’s crops, President Bush also
relaxed some cumbersome provisions of the Trade Sanctions Reform and
Export Enhancement Act of 2000 (TSRA) to facilitate the sale of food and
medical supplies to Cuba.
But the president also laid the groundwork for a harsher policy by appoint-
ing longtime opponents of rapprochement throughout the executive branch.13
For example, he named Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for Western
Hemisphere affairs, Lino Gutierrez and Daniel Fisk as Reich’s deputy assis-
tant secretaries, Roger Noriega as ambassador to the Organization of Ameri-
can States, Adolfo Franco as director of the Latin American bureau in the US
Agency for International Development (USAID), and Emilio González as
the National Security Council staffer handling Caribbean affairs, including
Cuba. Members of this group had worked together for many years, always
championing the most extreme policies against Cuba.
A decidedly hostile tone soon emerged in US policy pronouncements.
Notably, the United States criticized Cuba over its reaction to the 9/11 terror-
ist attacks, ignoring the Cuban government’s condemnation of the terrorism
on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and its offer of medical assistance
and the use of Cuban airspace for US aircraft.14 The Cuban government did
refuse to give carte blanche to the US campaign against terrorism, arguing
that the United Nations, not the United States, should direct this global effort.
By October 2001 Cuba had ratified twelve UN resolutions against terrorism
280 Chapter 22
stemming from the September 11 attacks. It also chose to avoid a confronta-

tion over US use of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base as a prison camp, al-
though US occupation of this Cuban territory had long been a source of anger
for Cuba. Raúl Castro, at the time Cuba’s defense minister, even offered to
provide medical assistance to the detainees.
As most US foreign policymakers concentrated on Afghanistan and the
Middle East after 9/11, the anti-Castro hardliners maintained their focus on
Havana. In May 2002, for example, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton
attempted to undermine former president Jimmy Carter’s planned visit to
Cuba by falsely charging that “Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological
warfare” capability and had “provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue
states.”15 When a National Intelligence Council officer challenged Bolton’s
claims, the undersecretary demanded he be fired. Yet the allegations were
never substantiated and were not included in the State Department’s annual
report on global terrorism.16
Carter broached the issue of human rights during his visit to Cuba. In a
lecture at the University of Havana—broadcast twice over Cuban radio and
television and reprinted in the next day’s Granma—he called for political
reforms and praised a petition drive spearheaded by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas,
founder of the Christian Liberation Movement, to change the constitution.
Called the Varela Project, the constitutional initiative demanded that the
National Assembly consider amendments to permit freedom of association,
expand private enterprise, and establish a new electoral system.17
The Varela Project collected more than 11,000 signatures between 1998
and 2002. But the National Assembly rejected the petition’s demands. In-
stead, it accepted a counterpetition that one million Cubans signed in a drive
the government organized. It called for a constitutional revision declaring
Cuba’s political system could not be changed merely by new laws, and that
“Cuba will never return to capitalism.”
Carter received a warm reception from the Cuban government despite his
call for reform. A Cuban official explained at the time that the government
reacted positively because Carter had made his proposals with respect, ac-
knowledging that it was Cuba’s prerogative to organize its society without ex-
ternal pressure or influence. In contrast, the chief US diplomat on the island,
James Cason, seemed determined to antagonize the Cuban government. In
2002, he increased the number of shortwave radios the US Interests Section
gave away to Cubans, saying the project would enable Cubans to gain access
to information, including Radio Martí, whose shortwave broadcasts Cuba did
not jam. The radios also were capable of receiving coded messages sent by
covert operatives. While acknowledging that diplomats typically do not en-
gage in subversion, Cason told USA Today that Cuba “is a different place.”18
Meanwhile, USAID increased funding for “independent” journalists and

libraries to produce and distribute anti-regime information. A 2001 study
by the American Library Association reported that the “independent librar-
ies” were essentially private collections held by political dissidents.19 In
March 2003, President Bush signed executive orders designed to limit of-
ficial and nongovernment contacts between the countries, and he canceled
semi-annual migration talks between the two countries. These involved the
review of how the 1995 migration accord—under which the United States
returned to Cuba exiles picked up at sea—was being implemented. At about
the same time, US officials began to issue fewer visas to Cuban scholars for
travel to the United States.
Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba

The renewed hostility directed at Cuba was not sufficiently harsh to satisfy
hardliners, who pressured President Bush to do more.20 On October 10,
2003—the 135th anniversary of the start of Cuba’s 1868 ten-year Inde-
pendence War against Spain—he announced the creation of a Commission
for Assistance to a Free Cuba (CAFC), headed by Secretary of State Colin
Powell and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez, a
Cuban-American.
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger
Noriega, the deeply ideological coauthor of the Helms-Burton bill, coor-
dinated the commission’s activities. Dan Fisk, who also had been a staffer
for Senator Jesse Helms, led the working group that drew up plans aimed at
“hastening Cuba’s transition.” Bush’s charge to the commission was “to plan
for the happy day when Castro’s regime is no more.”21
The CAFC’s May 2004 report included delusional plans for a US oc-
cupation, from reorganizing the economy and the educational system to the
holding of multiparty elections. Its essential strategy for accelerating regime
change was to deny Cuba money from US visitors and to limit all forms of
contact between Americans and Cubans. President Bush used the report’s
recommendations to tighten the embargo. His action proved particularly oner-
ous for Cuban-Americans who had been able to travel to Cuba on grounds of
family medical emergencies.
Under the new rules, “An individual can decide when they want to travel
once every three years,” Fisk callously told Reuters. “So if they have a dying
relative they have to figure out when they want to travel.”22 In addition, only
parents, grandparents, siblings, and one’s own children qualified as “fam-
ily”; previously, uncles and aunts had been included. The new regulations
also curtailed three hundred college and university study abroad programs
282 Chapter 22
and educational travel sponsored by organizations such as the Smithsonian

Institution and National Geographic. In 2003, an estimated 30,000 Americans
had gone to Cuba on educational programs licensed under relaxed Clinton
administration rules.
In 2005, after winning a second term, President Bush appointed Caleb Mc-
Carry to be Cuban Transition Coordinator, in effect centralizing the effort to
overthrow the Cuban government. McCarry was given an $80 million budget,
though the money was largely spent inside the United States as a form of pa-
tronage to anti-Castro Cubans who created organizations with names fancifully
larded with terms like “freedom” and “democracy.” The Government Account-
ability Office harshly criticized McCarry’s project, finding there was “misuse
of funds” and “weaknesses in program oversight that increased the risk of
grantees’ improperly using grant funds and failing to comply with US laws.”23
Cuban foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque described McCarry as the “Paul
Bremer for Cuba,” referring to the US consul who disastrously ruled Iraq after
the 2003 invasion; activist Oswaldo Payá criticized the plan by saying, “Any
transition in Cuba is for Cubans to define, lead, organize and co-ordinate.”24
Trouble with Europe

The Bush administration’s tougher sanctions and bombastic rhetoric in 2003
set off alarm bells in Havana. US officials had used similar language prior to
the March invasion of Iraq, which was undertaken on the basis of manufac-
tured evidence.25 Cuban leaders imagined hardliners could convince President
Bush that widespread criticism on the island was evidence that Cubans would
be waiting for American liberators with roses and jubilation.26
As a result of a military that had been downsized during the Special Period,
Cuban security was based on a “people’s war” strategy that depended on the
solidarity of the Cuban citizenry and everyone’s willingness to fight. Cuba’s
generals worried that even a small crack in the façade of unity might invite
US intervention, which made the harsh suppression of dissent necessary.
This mind-set in part explains why the Cuban government arrested seventy-
five prominent anti-regime critics in March 2003 and gave them unusually
long prison terms—from six to twenty-eight years. Their arrests were a sharp
warning aimed at discouraging further dissent.27
Nearly twenty of the “dissidents” turned out to be state agents who had
infiltrated groups opposing the regime and obtained evidence that those
charged were receiving money directly from US agencies or indirectly
through organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy. No-
tably, the government did not arrest Payá, who had refused to compromise his
project by accepting such funds.
About a month after the arrest of the group of seventy-five, several Eu-
ropean countries individually declared they would reevaluate their trade,
economic assistance, and diplomatic contacts with Cuba as a response to the
arrests and the summary execution of three ferry hijackers.28 Two weeks later,
the European Union (EU) announced it was freezing “the procedure to con-
sider the admission of Cuba into the Africa-Pacific-Caribbean (ACP) Coto-
nou Agreement.”29 The EU presidency (held by Greece) followed up in June,
denouncing Cuba’s “deplorable actions” and demanding that Cuba release
all political prisoners. These moves were a serious matter for the economy:
more than 50 percent of direct foreign investment had come from EU states,
25 percent from Spain alone.
Yet Cuban leaders were willing to risk a break with Europe, because they
perceived that suppressing internal dissent was more important than cultivat-
ing favorable international opinion. On June 12, 2003, Fidel led hundreds of
thousands of people in a protest march past European embassies in Havana.
The New York Times reported that “marchers carried . . . signs ridiculing
Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain and Prime Minister Silvio Berlus-
coni of Italy as fascists.”30 In his July 26th speech, on the fiftieth anniversary
of the failed Moncada attack, the Cuban president dismissed the importance
of Europe’s decisions. “Cuba does not need the aid of the European Union to
survive,” he asserted bluntly, noting that the EU had donated only an aver-
age of about $4 million annually over the prior three years. “What does this
amount really mean for a country that suffered the impact of three hurricanes
between November of 2001 and October of 2002, resulting in 2.5 billion
dollars in damages for our country?” He added that the loss of trade with
Europe also would not be significant because in the previous five years Cuba
had imported on average $1.5 billion of goods annually from Europe while
exporting less than half that value in Cuban products.31
Ironically, the decrease in commerce with Europe was offset by increasing
imports from the United States. Cuba was able to step up purchases of food and
medicine produced by US companies—made legal under the 2000 TSRA—
after US officials reduced the red tape involved in these transactions because of
the damage caused by Hurricane Michelle in November 2001. In 2002, Cuba
bought $146 million in goods from the United States, an amount that more
than doubled to $340 million by 2006.32 US food imports also came with lower
shipping costs than European food. Some Cuban officials even imagined that
the renewed trade might spur agrobusiness lobbyists and some members of
Congress from farm districts to pressure the Bush administration to relax or end
the embargo. The TSRA still required that the US Treasury Department license
each sale, which had to be made without credit. Sellers also had to verify that
none of the products were available to the Cuban military.
284 Chapter 22
CUBA TURNS TO LATIN AMERICA AND CHINA
Despite Cuba’s increased trade with the United States, 2003 marked a turning
point in its foreign-policy orientation. Cuba once again concentrated its at-
tention on third world countries to which it could relate with mutual respect,
not asymmetric requirements. Cuba had built a deep well of appreciation
in the third world because of its assistance programs and sustained military
commitment in Angola against the apartheid South African regime. Nelson
Mandela highlighted this respect during a 1991 trip to Cuba, the year after he
was released from prison (see box on next page). In a speech on July 26, with
Fidel Castro at his side, Mandela declared: “The Cuban people hold a special
place in the hearts of the people of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have
made a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparal-
leled for its principled and selfless character.”
Third world countries acknowledged Cuba as a global leader in February
2003 by naming it as the host of the 2006 Summit of the Non-Aligned Move-
ment (NAM), and consequently the organization’s chair for the three years
that followed. Havana had been the venue of a summit once before, in 1979.
Only Yugoslavia, one of the four core founders of NAM, had been previously
honored this way.
Two months later, Latin American countries elected Cuba to hold one of
the region’s six seats on the United Nations Human Rights Commission, de-
spite Cuba’s harsh sentencing of seventy-five people in March. (The General
Assembly voted by region in choosing the fifty-three members of the com-
mission, which was replaced by the UN Human Rights Council in 2006.)
The vote was a clear rebuke to the United States, which had lobbied against
Cuba’s selection, and it left White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer spitting
mad. “Having Cuba serve again on the Human Rights Commission is like
putting Al Capone in charge of bank security,” he said.33
A leftward turn in Latin American politics was one reason for Cuba’s in-
creased confidence. Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998 as Venezuela’s president
was followed by the victories of Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002,
Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner in 2003, Uruguay’s Tabaré Ramón Vázquez in
2004, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa in 2005, and Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and
Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2006.
Venezuela
Political scientist Max Azicri explains that the Cuban-Venezuelan associa-
tion was held together by three interconnected ties: the personal relationship
between Fidel and Chávez, the shared political goals for the hemisphere of
Nelson Mandela in Cuba, 1991
We have come here today recognizing our great debt to the Cuban people.
What other country has such a history of selfless behavior as Cuba has shown
for the people of Africa? How many countries benefit from Cuban health care
professionals and educators? . . . How many countries threatened by imperialism
or fighting for their freedom have been able to count on the support of Cuba?
I was still in prison when I first heard of the massive help which the Cuban
international forces were giving to the people of Angola. The help was of such
a scale that it was difficult for us to believe it, when the Angolans were under
attack by the combined forces of South Africa, the FALA [Armed Forces for
the Liberation of Angola] who were financed by the CIA, mercenaries, UNITA
[National Union for the Total Independence of Angola], and Zaire in 1975.
. . . We also acknowledge that the action was carried out by the masses in
Cuba and that those who fought and died in Angola are only a small portion
of those who volunteered to go. To the Cuban people internationalism is not
only a word but something which they have put into practice for the benefit
of large sectors of mankind. . . . The defeat of the racist army made it possible
for the people of Namibia to achieve their independence. The decisive defeat
of the aggressive apartheid forces destroyed the myth of the invincibility of
the white oppressor. . . . Without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organiza-
tions would not have been legalized. The defeat of the racist army in Cuito
Cuanavale made it possible for me to be here with you today.*
Figure 22.2. During his visit to Cuba in 1991, Nelson Mandela delivers an
address in Matanzas at the annual July 26 commemoration. Photo by Liborio
Noval, courtesy of Granma.
* Nelson Mandela, “Speech at the Rally in Cuba,” July 26, 1991, in Nelson Mandela and Fidel
Castro, How Far We Slaves Have Come! (Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 1991). Copyright © Pathfinder
Press (1991). Reprinted by permission.
286 Chapter 22
the two leaders, and the mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services
between the two countries.34 Chávez looked to Fidel Castro as his spiritual
mentor and once in office turned to the Cuba leader for advice. He told Larry
King in 2009 that the Cuban leader is “like a father to me, like a father, a
political father.”35 Their relationship was cemented even more firmly in
2002, when Castro’s advice and actions may have saved Chávez’s life and
presidency during an attempted coup against the Venezuelan president. The
Cuban president reportedly counseled the Venezuelan by phone and then
arranged for his daughter, María Gabriela Chávez, to speak via telephone
on Cuban radio. She announced that her father had not resigned, contrary
to reports the Venezuelan media had conveyed. International broadcasts of
her message then spurred Chávez supporters to mount large demonstrations
against the coup leaders.36
In October 2000, Venezuela began to sell oil to some South American
countries and Cuba at a price that was one-third lower than the world market
price. The purchases could be made with credit; the interest rate was 2 percent
and the loan would be due in fifteen years. By 2001, Cuba was importing
more oil from Venezuela than it had imported from the Soviet Union in 1990.
Under a 2005 agreement, Venezuela sold 53,000 barrels of oil daily to Cuba
at a subsidized rate of $27 per barrel. Cuba paid for the oil, in part, by sending
sports trainers, teachers, and doctors to Venezuela.
More than three million Venezuelans benefited from the Barrio Adentro
Deportivo (Sports in the Neighborhood) program, and Cuban coaches trained
68 of the 109 Venezuelan athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.37 Teachers in
Cuba’s Misión Robinson program contributed to the reduction of illiteracy in
Venezuela, and the doctors helped Venezuela establish a medical program for
the poor, Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood). Cuba sent 30,000 medi-
cal personnel to Venezuela, trained 40,000 doctors, and provided eye opera-
tions to more than 100,000 Venezuelans though Operación Milagro (Opera-
tion Miracle). Milagro later expanded to other countries in Latin America and
by 2013 had restored the eyesight of more than two million people.38 Cuban
doctors in Venezuela also provided basic health care to impoverished popula-
tions in the Venezuelan countryside, which in turn brought praise and support
for Chávez among the poorest sectors of the country.
At the start of the millennium, Cuba and Venezuela also began to imple-
ment an ambitious project, as Castro described it in October 2000, “to unite
the Latin American and Caribbean nations and to struggle for a world eco-
nomic order that brings more justice to all peoples.”39 What started with the
sale of oil and free medical care emerged in 2004 as ALBA, the Spanish
acronym for Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America. (The
name was changed in 2009 to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our
America.) Aimed at competing with the US-proposed Free Trade Area of

the Americas, ALBA sought to economically integrate Latin American and
Caribbean countries. It also created a development bank and served as a co-
ordinating mechanism for development projects. Following the January 2006
inauguration of Evo Morales, Bolivia became the third country in ALBA.
China
Despite China’s size, wealth, military power, and potential for domination,
Cuban leaders have tended to view China differently than powerful countries
that once dominated Cuba. In part, their attitude reflects the belief of Cuba’s
leaders that China’s Latin American policy is based sincerely “on the Five
Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” which mandates that “China and Latin
America and the Caribbean will treat each other as equals and respect each
other.”40 China scholar Adrian Hearn notes that analysts “detect genuine
traces of traditional values in Chinese policymaking,” particularly a Confu-
cian “emphasis on consensual ‘harmonious’ development, their pursuit of
‘holistic’ outcomes, and their implicit advocacy of state stewardship over
national and international affairs.”41
Cuba was the first Latin American country to have diplomatic relations with
the People’s Republic. But China had little capacity to provide much support
to Cuba until the late 1980s, just at the time when the Soviet Union and CMEA
were falling apart. In the 1990s, as China searched for raw materials to fuel its
fast-growing industrial complex, it began to invest in Latin America.
The Asian giant did not place Cuba very high on its initial target list. It did
ship half a million bicycles to Cuba in 1992 and 1993 on credit, and in 1997,
it funded and provided technical assistance for the start of a small Cuban
bicycle industry. But it was not until 2001 that China provided nearly $400
million in long-term loans and credits to upgrade Cuba’s telecommunication
infrastructure and to enable Cuba to purchase Chinese televisions, washing
machines, and air conditioners. As noted earlier, it also made a $1 billion
investment in modernizing Cuba’s nickel mining and production facilities.
Notably, Chinese trade with Caribbean Basin and South American countries
jumped from $12.6 billion in 2000 to $102.6 billion in 2007.42
Once the economic relationship began to grow, China sought to influence
Cuba’s business practices by encouraging greater reliance on privatization.
Sensitive to the Cuban leadership’s concern about growing inequality and the
loss of control over the direction of the economy, China’s advisers proposed
simply a greater standardization of routine accounting procedures and the
slow introduction of enterprise-to-enterprise contact so that not all interac-
tions would occur at the state level.
288 Chapter 22
But while Fidel remained in charge, the advice tended to fall on deaf ears.
He generally viewed privatization and market mechanisms as fundamental
threats to the Revolution’s values. In a November 2005 speech to students at
the University of Havana, he sarcastically referred to the reforms in the 1990s
as “the ‘progressive advances’ of the special period,” arguing that in fact they
were “robbery” that engendered inequality and theft.
Pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union, he suggested that it was
caused by reforms that produced inequality, and he feared the same was hap-
pening in Cuba. “Were you aware of all these inequalities that I have been
talking about?” he asked.
Did you know that there are people who earn forty or fifty times the amount one
of those doctors over there in the mountains of Guatemala, part of the “Henry
Reeve” Contingent [Cuban international medical brigade], earns in one month?
. . . saving lives and earning five percent or ten percent of what one of those dirty
little crooks earns, selling gasoline to the new rich, diverting resources from the
ports . . . stealing in a five-star hotel by exchanging a bottle of rum for another
of lesser quality and pocketing the dollars for which he sells the drinks.43
SETTING CUBA ON A NEW COURSE
On July 31, 2006, news spread quickly throughout Havana that President
Castro had been rushed to the hospital. At 9:15 p.m. that evening, his chief
aide, Carlos Valenciaga, reported that Fidel had undergone surgery for major
intestinal bleeding and an intestinal blockage. (This would be the first in a
series of emergency abdominal procedures, during which the Cuban leader
reportedly almost died three times on the operating table.) As a consequence,
he temporarily ceded his three positions—head of state, first secretary of
Cuba’s Communist Party, and commander in chief of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces—to Raúl Castro. Fidel was twenty-six days shy of his eighti-
eth birthday. His younger brother was seventy-five.
Some people cheered and danced in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana.
It was the moment about which many US policymakers and Cuban exiles
had been dreaming. But for President George W. Bush, it was a nightmare.
Anticipating chaos and a massive exodus, he warned Cubans “against leaving
the island.”44
In fact, there was no turmoil, no rush for the exit. Reality confounded crit-
ics who believed the country was held together only by Fidel’s charisma or
iron fist. On Havana’s streets, people expressed sadness and continued on
their way. Daily life in Cuba was undisturbed. The transition occurred almost
seamlessly. Historian Julia Sweig noted that “Fidel’s almost five decades
in power came to a close last summer not with the expected bang, or even
really a whimper, but in slow motion, with Fidel himself orchestrating the
transition.” She aptly characterized the handover as the Cuban leader’s “final
victory.”45 A new era had begun.
For a government to remain legitimate after the passing of its charismatic
leader, it needs to substitute another form of legitimacy, that is, another basis
on which the leaders can justify their right to rule. Consider that the United
States had the same problem in its early years. The five presidents who fol-
lowed the charismatic George Washington gained their legitimacy by their
connection to the American Revolution, though that legitimacy was thinning
when the son of a revolutionary leader, John Quincy Adams, became presi-
dent. Political struggles over the next thirty years, and ultimately a civil war,
settled the legitimacy of the national government.
In a similar way, establishing the government’s legitimacy without Fidel
was a primary task that confronted Raúl Castro as he accepted the reins of
power. Of course, as one of the Cuban Revolution’s leaders, he was able to
rely on his personal bona fides as a revolutionary—as early US presidents
did. In addition, he surrounded himself with officials who also participated in
the Revolution. But the members of the “historical” generation that overthrew
Fulgencio Batista in 1959 (los historicos) were roughly all the same age.
High on Raúl’s agenda, then, was strengthening a more rational, legal, and
institutional basis for authority that would be necessary to sustain the Cuban
Revolution in the future.46 At the same time, he had to institute change, to de-
velop a model appropriate for the twenty-first century that would enable Cuba
to develop its economy, maintain its commitment to providing basic needs
for all Cubans equitably, sustain Cuba’s high standing in Latin America and
the third world, and remain independent and sovereign over its own affairs.
NOTES
1. Lázaro J. González González, “Melaza (Molasses) That Tastes Like a Movie,”
On Cuba, January 18, 2013, http://oncubamagazine.com/culture/melaza-molasses
-tastes-movie.
2. Jorge Mario Sánchez-Egozcue, “Challenges of Economic Restructuring in
Cuba,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro, ed.
Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 134.
3. Archibald R. M. Ritter, “Cuba’s Economic Reorientation,” in Cuba: In Transi-
tion? Pathways to Renewal, Long-Term Development and Global Reintegration, ed.
Mauricio Font (New York: Bildner Center, CUNY, 2006).
290 Chapter 22
4. Pedro Monreal, “Development as an Unfinished Affair: Cuba after the ‘Great
Adjustment’ of the 1990s,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolu-
tion, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
5. Peter H. Kuck, “Nickel,” in US Department of the Interior, US Geological
Survey, Minerals Yearbook—2003, 52.21, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/
commodity/nickel/nickemyb03.pdf.
6. Philip Peters, “Cutting Losses: Cuba Downsizes Its Sugar Industry,” in A
Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al.
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 135–37.
7. Philip Peters, “Cuba’s Small Entrepreneurs: Down but Not Out” (Arlington,
VA: Lexington Institute, September 2006), 6, 7.
8. Hope Bastion Martinez, “‘Adjusting to the Adjustment’: Difference, Stratifica-
tion and Social Mobility in Contemporary Havana, Cuba,” PhD diss. (Washington,
DC: American University, 2016), 134–40.
9. Martinez, “‘Adjusting to the Adjustment,’” 131–32.
10. Margot Olavarria, “Rap and Revolution: Hip-Hop Comes to Cuba,” in A
11. John Williamson, “What Should the World Bank Think about the Washington
Consensus?” World Bank Research Observer 15, no. 2 (2000): 251–64.
12. Dexter Filkins and Dana Canedy, “Counting the Vote: Miami-Dade County;
Protest Influenced Miami-Dade’s Decision to Stop Recount,” New York Times, No-
vember 24, 2000, A41; Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball, “Cubans at the Wheel,”
Newsweek, December 11, 2000, 40.
13. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 516–17; Morley and McGil-
lion, Unfinished Business, 187.
14. Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “Like Sisyphus’s Stone: US-Cuban Relations in
the Aftermath of September 11, 2001,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinvent-
ing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2007), 220–21.
15. David Gonzalez, “Carter and Powell Cast Doubt on Bioarms in Cuba,” New
York Times, May 14, 2002.
16. Wayne S. Smith and Anya K. Landau, “Cuba and Bioweapons: Groundless Al-
legations Squander US Credibility on Terrorism,” CIP Special Report, July 12, 2002
(Washington, DC: Center for International Policy, 2002).
17. Tim Padgett, “Cuba’s Catholic Dissident: The Saga of Oswaldo Payá,” in A
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
18. Bill Sternberg, “US Works for Regime Change in Cuba, Too,” USA Today,
October 23, 2002, 10A.
19. American Library Association, “Report of Visit to ACURIL XXXI and Its Host
Country, Cuba, May 23–May 30, 2001,” July 13, 2001, http://www.ala.org/offices/
iro/iroactivities/alacubanlibrariesreport.
20. Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic
Politics of an American Foreign Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2005), 132–34, 150.
21. “President Bush Discusses Cuba Policy in Rose Garden Speech,” October 10,
2003 (Washington, DC: Office of the Press Secretary, the White House).
22. Quoted in Silvia Wilhelm, “New Cuba Policy Is Cruel, Ineffective,” Progres-
sive, June 23, 2004.
23. US Government Accountability Office, “Foreign Assistance: US Democracy
Assistance for Cuba Needs Better Management and Oversight,” GAO-07-147, No-
vember 2006, http://www.gao.gov/assets/260/253560.pdf.
24. As quoted in Daniel P. Erikson, The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United
States, and the Next Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 23.
25. Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, The Italian Letter: The Forgery That Started the
Iraq War (Amazon Digital Services: Kindle Edition, 2014).
26. Wayne S. Smith, “Provocation, War Spawned Cuba Crackdown,” Baltimore
Sun, April 15, 2003.
27. Edward B. Atkeson, “Why Cuba Fired,” Washington Post, March 13, 1996.
28. Patrick Michael Rucker, “European Nations May Downgrade Cuba Ties after
Castro Crackdown,” Financial Times, April 22, 2003.
29. Joaquín Roy, “The European Union’s Perception of Cuba: From Frustration to
Irritation,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip
30. “Huge March in Havana Protests European Criticism of Castro,” New York
Times, June 13, 2003.
31. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anni-
versary of the Attack on the Moncada,” Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 2003, http://www
.cuba.cu/Gobierno/Discursos/2003/Ing/F260703i.html.
32. US Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, “Foreign Trade: Trade in Goods
with Cuba,” May 16, 2016, https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2390.html.
33. Ari Fleischer, “Press Briefing,” Office of the Press Secretary, the White
House, April 29, 2003, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/
2003/04/20030429-3.html#2.
34. Max Azicri, “The Castro-Chávez Alliance,” Latin American Perspectives 36,
no. 1 (January 2009): 108.
35. Hugo Chávez, “Interview,” CNN Larry King Live, September 24, 2009, http://
transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0909/24/lkl.01.html.
36. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 526–28.
37. Carlos A. Romero, “South-South Cooperation between Venezuela and Cuba,”
Special Report on South-South Cooperation: A Challenge to the Aid System? (Re-
ality of Aid Network, 2010), 108, 110; http://www.realityofaid.org/wp-content/up
loads/2013/02/ROA-SSDC-Special-ReportEnglish.pdf.
38. John M. Kirk, “Cuban Medical Internationalism Under Raúl Castro,” in A
39. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Key Address to a Solemn Session of the National Assembly,”
Caracas, Venezuela, October 27, 2000, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2000/
ing/f271000i.html.
40. “China’s Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean,” Xinhua, Novem-
ber 5, 2008, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-11/05/content_10308117.htm.
292 Chapter 22
41. Adrian H. Hearn, “China and the Future of Cuba,” in A Contemporary Cuba
Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 233.
42. David Shambaugh, “China’s New Foray into Latin America,” YaleGlobal
Online Magazine, November 17, 2008, 1, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/china
%E2%80%99s-new-foray-latin-america.
43. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Delivered at the Commemoration of the 60th Anni-
versary of His Admission to University of Havana,” November 17, 2005, http://www
44. Pablo Bachelet, “US Policy Gives the Bush Administration Few Options in
Cuba, Critics Say,” McClatchy Newspapers, August 2, 2006.
45. Julia E. Sweig, “Fidel’s Final Victory,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2007).
46. Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Continuity and Change in Cuba at 50: The Revolu-
tion at a Crossroads,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al.
Chapter 23
The Transition from Fidel

to Raúl Castro, 2006–2009
[S]ince March, an experiment has been underway in six municipalities

. . . where twenty thousand liters of milk have been directly and consis-
tently delivered by the producer to 230 rationed stores and for social con-
sumption in these localities every day. In this fashion, we have eliminated
absurd procedures through which this valuable food product traveled
hundreds of miles before reaching a consumer who, quite often, lived
a few hundred meters away from the livestock farm, and, with this, the
product losses and fuel expenses involved. I will give you one example.
. . . Currently, in Mantua, one of the western most municipalities in Pinar
del Rio, 2,492 liters of milk, which meet established consumption needs,
are being distributed directly to the municipality’s forty rationed stores
and two thousand liters of fuel are being saved every month. What was
the situation until four months ago? The closest pasteurizer is located in
the Sandino municipality, forty kilometers away from Mantua, the most
important town in the area. Thus, in order to deliver the milk to that plant,
a truck had to travel a minimum of eighty kilometers. . . . The milk that
children and other consumers in Mantua receive on a regulated basis, once
pasteurized at the Sandino plant, returned, shortly afterwards, on a vehicle
which, as it is logical to assume, had to return to its base of operations
after delivering the product. In total, it traveled 160 kilometers, a journey
which, as I explained, was in fact longer.
—Raúl Castro, July 26, 20071
PROFOUND DEBATE
As Raúl Castro took over the reins of leadership, Cuba was at a high point in
its relations with countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and at a nadir
293
294 Chapter 23
in its relations with the United States and Europe. The Cuban government had
weathered a Special Period that might have destabilized most other countries,
but it was clear that political and economic reforms were necessary if the
Cuban Revolution was going to be sustainable. The Cuban people had dem-
onstrated a remarkable resilience and ability to adapt, but in 2006, the new
leader could not be certain how much longer they would be patient.
No One Can Afford to Spend More Than What They Have

More than 70 percent of Cuba’s population—all those born after the Revolu-
tion—had known no leader other than Fidel Castro when he passed the reins
of power to his brother. This presented an enormous challenge to Raúl Castro,
even though he was first vice president and minister of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces (FAR), had been a revolutionary commander, and served at
Fidel’s side for the previous forty-seven years. He was still merely the interim
president, supposedly in the position only until the elder Castro recovered his
health. Recognizing that his authority was tenuous, the new leader proceeded
cautiously. He announced few changes and made no dramatic moves during
his first eighteen months in office. Yet he began to prepare the country for
what he hoped would be a reinvented Cuban revolution.
A three-part investigative report on corruption in Juventud Rebelde, the
official newspaper of the Communist Party’s youth wing, was an early signal
of changes to come. Published in October 2006, the series could not have
appeared without Raúl’s approval. It revealed what most people already
suspected. State-owned stores routinely sold products that weighed less than
the amount customers had paid for; food at state restaurants had less meat or
cheese than regulations required. Headlined “The Big Old Swindle” (La vieja
gran estafa), the two reporters found in their three-month investigation that
52 percent of the centers they visited had price violations or alterations in the
standard quality of products.2 A subsequent story in February 2007 reported
that the sale of counterfeit products was widespread, especially in the pro-
duction of “alcoholic drinks, cigarettes and cigars, soap, perfume, deodorant,
coffee, ice-cream, and bottled water.” At one store in Havana, bags labeled as
export-quality Cubita coffee—requiring buyers to pay with Cuban convert-
ible currency, the CUC—were filled with old coffee and ground peas.3
In December 2006, the acting president encouraged university students to
engage in the kind of open debate about Cuba’s future that his older brother
had eschewed. Drawing on his own experience, the younger Castro said, “The
first principle in constructing any armed forces is the sole command. But that
doesn’t mean that we cannot discuss . . . that way we reach decisions, and
I’m talking about big decisions.”4 He followed this admonition in July 2007,
The Transition from Fidel to Raúl Castro, 2006–2009 295
offering a frank assessment of Cuba’s economic circumstances in the annual

address commemorating the 1953 Moncada attack.5
Significantly, Raúl did not pin all of Cuba’s problems on the United States.
He did observe that the US embargo “has a direct influence both on the ma-
jor economic decisions as well as on each Cuban’s most basic needs.” But
he emphasized that it was one of several external factors Cuba had to take
into account in “ensuring the socialist principle that each should contribute
according to their capacity and receive according to their work.” The main
issue, he declared, was that
No one, no individual or country, can afford to spend more than what they have.
It seems elementary, but we do not always think and act in accordance with this
inescapable reality. To have more, we have to begin by producing more, with a
sense of rationality and efficiency, so that we may reduce imports, especially of
food products—that may be grown here—whose domestic production is still a
long way away from meeting the needs of the population.
Then he warned that to achieve this goal “structural and conceptual changes
will have to be introduced.”
Challenging the Bureaucracy

It would have been difficult to find a Cuban who did not despise the labyrin-
thine system of bureaucratic rules and procedures that the interim president
pinpointed as a source of inefficiency and economic stagnation. As we quoted
him at the beginning of this chapter, he highlighted the problem on July 26,
2007, by describing the waste entailed in shipping fresh milk forty kilo-
meters to be pasteurized. Pasteurization, he noted, “makes sense” in “large
urban centers—even though it is customary in Cuba to boil all milk at home,
whether the milk is pasteurized or not.” But, he added, pasteurization “does
not prove viable” for a few liters in a rural area.
Members of the Communist Party and Young Communists studied that
speech in detail over the next months, not as commandments to be repeated
by rote, but almost as Delphic pronouncements that needed to be debated and
interpreted. Journalist Marc Frank obtained the guide prepared for discussion
leaders and reports that it admonished them to foster a “profound debate.”
This should occur, Frank quotes it saying, “in an atmosphere of complete
freedom and sincerity around the central themes of the [July 26th] speech.”
The main topics suggested for discussion included food production, import
substitution, and increasing production and efficiency.6 But as discussions
moved beyond the party into work centers, community meetings, and even
some publications, a new set of issues replaced the recommended topics.
296 Chapter 23
Cubans vented their anger over the dual-currency system, the resulting in-
equality, and their declining ability to purchase necessities with the state sala-
ries they were earning. They also complained about longer wait times to see
a medical professional, or the lack of a family doctor’s availability because
so many were serving in other countries. A large percentage of complaints
focused on onerous rules and bureaucratic red tape, which made bribes an
increasingly necessary cost in order to obtain a state service or license or to
avoid trouble from inspectors or the police.
There were still many achievements for which Cubans could be proud.
The UN’s 2009 Human Development Report ranked Cuba at 51 out of 194
countries, just behind Argentina (49) and Uruguay (50), and ahead of Mexico
(53), Costa Rica (54), and Brazil (75).7 In the 2004 Summer Olympics, Cuba
came in eleventh with twenty-seven medals. But the Special Period clearly
had taken an enormous toll. Increasing inequality, decreasing access to health
care and a good education, and above all a growing individualism and a
declining sense of communal solidarity had eroded distinctive aspects of the
Cuban Revolution. The wellspring of hope that nurtured Cubans’ belief in
the future, which had given them the energy and strength to defy the odds in
building a new society, seemed depleted.
No wonder, then, that the founding leaders worried about the Revolution’s
survival. In a 2005 speech, Fidel publicly vented his own foreboding about
the consequences of corruption. He declared, “This country can self-destruct;
this Revolution can destroy itself, but they [the United States] can never
destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.”8 For this
reason, Raúl sought to overcome the public’s ennui by renewing a flame of
idealism in his July 26, 2007, speech: “We must always remember—and not
to repeat it from memory like a dogma, but rather to apply it creatively in our
work every day—what comrade Fidel affirmed on May 1, 2000. . . . Revolu-
tion is unity, it is independence, it is fighting for our dreams for justice for
Cuba and for the world, it is the foundation of our patriotism, our socialism
and our internationalism.”
PRESIDENT RAÚL CASTRO
A Shared Vision of Sovereignty

Andrés Oppenheimer, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Miami Her-
ald, captured the conventional wisdom in Washington and Miami when he
wrote in 1992 that “Cuba’s socialist experiment” would soon be over. Fidel
Castro, he predicted, “would be able to muddle through and stretch his final
hour for a few months, perhaps even a few years, but his socialist dream was
doomed.”9 Yet Fidel managed to confound knowledgeable journalists, pun-
dits, politicians, government analysts, and scholars who predicted his and the
regime’s demise.
They mistakenly assumed the Cuban Revolution was akin either to East
European regimes, which fell quickly when the threat of Soviet intervention
evaporated, or South American military dictatorships led by caudillos, which
collapsed when the leader died or was removed. The Cuban Revolution was
different. It was a genuinely popular revolution, a revolution whose aims the
broad mass of Cubans supported.
Historian Antoni Kapcia discerningly summarizes the Revolution’s es-
sence as an “emphasis on the ‘nation’ and sovereignty, a belief in community
(and especially in solidarity and social conscience) and a reawakened sense
of Cuba’s ‘Latin American-ness.’”10 While Cubans throughout the island be-
lieved that Raúl fully embraced these goals, they also wanted a government
that helped them secure basic needs and fulfill their dreams.
The Cuban Communist Party (PCC), according to the country’s consti-
tution, “is the highest leading force [la fuerza dirigente superior] of the
society and State.”11 Yet by 2008, it was languishing. Led by old men and
increasingly disconnected from the travails most Cubans felt at the grass-
roots, it had not even managed to hold a Party Congress since 1997, though
one was supposed to be held every five years. In part, its decline resulted
from Fidel’s efforts to energize Cubans through participation in new mass
organizations disconnected from the PCC. These included the Association
of Veterans of the Cuban Revolution and the revitalized Federation of
University Students.
In seeking to instill revolutionary fervor among younger Cubans, as the
1961 Literacy Campaign did, and in building off the popular emotional cam-
paigns in support of Elián González’s return to Cuba, Fidel also inaugurated
several projects outside of regular institutional boundaries in 2000 and 2001.
The government sent tens of thousands of university students identified as
“disaffected” to new schools of social work, where they were trained in a
one-year course and then deployed to communities to work with the elderly,
young prisoners, and the physically challenged. High school students from
eastern provinces were brought to Havana to teach in elementary schools
abandoned by seasoned instructors who sought to earn hard currency in tour-
ism or abroad. As an accompaniment to new projects, the government began
to air university-level classes on television—Universidad Para Todos (Uni-
versity for Everyone)—to train the “emergency teachers” and to provide new
skills for laid-off workers in the downsized sugar industry.12
298 Chapter 23
Raúl Castro
Known for his discipline, extraordinary organizational ability, and pragma-

tism, Raúl Castro’s essential role in shaping Cuban history was long over-
shadowed by his larger-than-life older brother, Fidel. Born in Biran, Holguín,
on June 3, 1931, Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz also was the son of Ángel Castro
and Lina Ruz. Raúl attended Colegio Dolores in Santiago de Cuba and
Belén Jesuit Preparatory School in Havana, and studied social sciences at the
University of Havana. In 1953, he joined Socialist Youth, a wing of the Popular
Socialist Party, and represented the group at a Soviet-sponsored International
Conference in Vienna.
With his older brother, Fidel, Raúl then planned and engaged in the July
26, 1953, attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, for which
he was sent to prison. Released in 1955, when Cuban dictator Fulgencio
Batista issued a general amnesty, Raúl went to Mexico to work on plans for
the guerrilla war in Cuba. He was the leader who recruited Che Guevara into
the effort. In 1958, Raúl became commander of the second front in Oriente
(Cuba’s eastern-most province), which entailed aggregating and coordinating
several disparate guerrilla groups and establishing a quasi-government that
even had its own medical clinics, hospitals, and schools.
Possessing little equipment and starting only with young fighters from the
July 26th Movement, Raúl built a professional military force during the first
years of the revolutionary government’s operation. Initially named as second
commander, he became minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in late
1959 and held that position until 2008. Under his leadership, the Cuban
military not only had an international reputation for combat effectiveness; it
took on many roles, from developing the country’s infrastructure to organizing
a one-million-person militia. In the early 1990s, in the face of Special Period
shortages, Raúl successfully managed to downsize the military by 60 percent
without significant reaction. He advocated economic reforms such as the
legalization of the US dollar as a currency, and developed semi–state enter-
prises that employed former military personnel and were largely controlled
by the military.
Raúl also served as the first vice president of the Councils of State and
Ministers and second secretary of the PCC from the time of its founding in 1965
until 2011, when he was elected first secretary. In 2006, he became the tempo-
rary president when Fidel took ill; the National Assembly elected him president
on February 24, 2008. Reelected in 2013, he announced that he would not
stand for election again when his term ends in 2018. The Seventh Congress of
the PCC reelected him as first secretary in 2016 for a five-year term.
In 1959, Raúl married Vilma Espín Guillois, a July 26th Movement revolu-
tionary who also fought in the 1956–1958 conflict. She founded and served
as president of the Cuban Federation of Women until her death in 2007. They
had four children.
Raúl’s Preference for Organizational Order

Most of these ad hoc efforts ended after the National Assembly formally
elected Raúl as the new president in February 2008. In his inauguration
speech, he emphasized the importance of institutionalization and reestablish-
ing the PCC in the role the constitution gave it, as the highest leading force
of the society and state. “Fidel is Fidel, we all know it well. Fidel is irreplace-
able,” he declared, in effect acknowledging that this was the moment to trans-
fer the basis of the Revolution’s legitimacy from charisma to legal-rational
structures. “Only the Communist Party, the certain guarantor of the Cuban
nation’s unity,” he proclaimed, “can be the worthy heir to the confidence the
people endow in their leader.” In addition, he said, “Today’s circumstances
require a more compact and functional structure, with fewer centralized State
administrative agencies and a better distribution of the functions they fulfill.
This will . . . allow us to aggregate some decisive economic activities that are
presently dispersed among several agencies.”13
Perhaps because he had been so successful in building a well-functioning
military organization and then succeeded in adapting it to the Special Period
circumstances, or perhaps because he had worked in that organization for
nearly fifty years, or maybe because his personality was so different from his
brother’s, Raúl honored well-defined lines of authority and sought to estab-
lish accountability for achievements and errors.
Under Fidel’s leadership, the administration of policy tended to lack
coherence because three power centers had overlapping authority: govern-
mental ministries, the PCC, and the so-called Grupo de Apoyo (Support
Group)—Fidel Castro’s tight-knit, little-publicized kitchen cabinet of con-
fidants who were in their twenties and early thirties. This not only led to
duplication of efforts and poor coordination. It allowed the people in each
group to avoid taking responsibility for failures—passing the blame onto
those in another group. Young and inexperienced though they were, mem-
bers of the Grupo de Apoyo wielded the greatest influence because of their
proximity to Fidel and their personal connections when he appointed them
to high posts in the PCC or ministries.
With Fidel at the hub of the three-pronged power structure, stagnation
tended to accompany any policy initiative. No one felt secure in making deci-
sions; it seemed as if every action had to wait for the comandante’s approval.
Even his closest allies acknowledged that Fidel could only make so many
decisions that were based on well-reasoned analysis. Raúl would not run a
system that he perceived was so chaotic.
300 Chapter 23
Slow but Deliberate Change

Raúl’s election came with widespread anticipation that he would bring about
significant changes in Cuba’s economy and even its politics. There was
thus a nearly ear-shattering sigh of disappointment when he chose seventy-
eight-year-old José Ramón Machado Ventura to be first vice president of the
Council of State. A mere eight months younger than the president, Machado
Ventura commanded broad respect from older and still powerful members of
the PCC, many of whom opposed the introduction of market mechanisms. He
shared their skepticism about Cuba’s salvation via the market and his selec-
tion served to reassure party members that Raúl would take their views into
account. While Raúl had the military solidly behind him, he could not assume
unconditional support from the PCC. Moreover, even though the National
Assembly had elected him as president, he was still only the interim head of
the PCC. Fidel continued to retain the title of first secretary. (See table 23.1
Cuba’s Power Structure
Formally, Cuba has a tripartite governmental structure like the United States,
with executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Laid over this structure is
the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), which in effect acts as a coordinating
mechanism. High officials in the executive and legislative branches are also
leaders in the PCC.
The National Assembly of People’s Power is composed of 614 delegates
elected directly from districts of roughly equal population throughout the
country. It elects the president of the country, whose formal title is president
of the Council of State, which is the executive committee of the Assembly. All
the Council’s members are elected deputies in the National Assembly, which
meets twice each year. When it is not in session, the Council of State issues
decrees on its behalf. There is also a president of the National Assembly.
The executive branch is headed by the Council of Ministers, which is similar
to the president’s cabinet in the United States, though it meets more frequently
and makes formal decisions. There are twenty-two members of the Council.
An additional nine members, which include President Raúl Castro, the first
vice president (currently Miguel Díaz-Canel), and four other vice presidents,
serve as the Executive Committee.
The PCC is nominally governed by the Party Congress, which is supposed to
meet once in five years. Its most recent meeting occurred in April 2016, when
nearly 1,200 delegates participated. The Party Congress elects the Central
Committee (currently it has 120 members) and the first secretary of the PCC.
Like his brother, Raúl Castro serves both as PCC first secretary and as president
of the Councils of State and Ministers. While he announced in 2011 that he
would not seek reelection as president in 2018, he was reelected as the PCC
first secretary in 2016, and so will still hold some power until 2021.
Table 23.1. Cuban Government Organizational Structure
Legislative Bodies Executive Bodies Judicial Bodies
National Assembly Council of Ministers People’s Supreme Court
614 delegates elected Highest administrative Nominally independent
directly from equally and executive body, Elected by and accountable
proportioned districts which, in effect, to the National Assembly
Assembly formally constitutes the
approves all laws government of the
Headed by the president of republic
the National Assembly Coordinates and directs
execution of political,
Council of State economic, cultural,
31 members scientific, social, and
Serves as executive defense policies
committee of National Members include:
Assembly chief of state, vice
Acts in place of the presidents, and
National Assembly when heads of government
it is out of session ministries; may include
Headed by president of others designated by
Cuba who is the chief law; currently, the
of state Council of Ministers
has 33 members
Provincial Assemblies Provincial Administration Appeals Courts

Each province has its own Carries out provincial- Seven regional courts
assembly level administrative National Assembly elects
Delegates elected directly functions judges
by districts Responsible to provincial
Responsible for overseeing assembly
provincial administration
Municipal Assemblies Municipal Administration People’s Courts

First level of political Carries out administrative Municipal assemblies elect
authority functions at the local judges
Oversee functioning of level Implement decisions from
municipal administration Responsible to municipal Supreme Court
One delegate elected from assembly
each district Expected to be given District Courts
more authority in future Adjudicate civil and
Popular Councils as national government criminal cases
Support the municipal attempts to decentralize
assembly in the exercise decision-making
of its powers and facilitate
better understanding and
addressing the needs and
interests of the inhabitants
of its area of action
Source: Chart produced by Philip Brenner and Teresa Garcia from Cuban government sources.
302 Chapter 23
for an overview of how the Cuban government is organized at the national,

provincial, and local levels.)
The new president waited one year to institute any major reform. Then, in
a quick stroke on March 2, 2009, he dismissed Carlos Lage Dávila, secretary
of the Council of Ministers and the vice president in charge of the Cuban
economy, Fernando Remírez de Estenoz, head of the international committee
of the Communist Party’s Central Committee who had been a vice minister
of foreign relations, ambassador to the United Nations, and head of Cuban
Interests Section in Washington, and eight ministers, including Foreign Min-
ister Felipe Pérez Roque.
Lage, Remírez, and Pérez Roque had been members of Fidel’s Grupo de
Apoyo and were generally viewed as likely leaders among the generation that
would take over when the historicos retired. The three had been caught on
surveillance tapes sharing information with Conrado Hernández, a man who
allegedly worked for Spain’s intelligence service and whom Cuban authori-
ties had arrested in February 2009.14 But none of the three went to prison.
Remírez, for example, was relegated to working as a doctor in a local neigh-
borhood clinic (he had been trained as a physician).
The purge was less an attempt by President Castro to put his own loyalists
in place than it was to break down the competing lines of authority and estab-
lish the orderly administrative process he promised in his inaugural address.
Fidel made clear he understood this rationale by justifying the dismissals in
an article published in Granma. He wrote that the lure of power had “awak-
ened ambitions that led them to disgrace.”15
At the same time that Raúl removed officials, he combined four existing
ministries into two: the Ministries of Foreign Trade and Investment and Food.
He also promoted some younger PCC leaders whom he viewed as exemplary
managers into key governmental positions. Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez,
who had been party chief in Holguín Province, became the new minister of
higher education, though he was a civil engineer with no experience in educa-
tion administration. Earlier, Raúl had returned some former party leaders who
were governmental ministers to party leadership roles so that they wore two
leadership hats. Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, minister of communication, for
example, became a member of the Political Bureau. The president’s ultimate
vision was to have the party function more as a board of directors than an
operational branch.
However, changes in the political structure were accompanied by only mi-
nor economic reforms. Economist Jorge Mario Sánchez aptly judged that they
“pointed in the right direction but were insufficient to deal with the roots of
dysfunctionality.”16 In 2007, the government began to issue licenses that al-
lowed drivers to use private cars as taxis. In 2008, it lifted the ban on selling
computers, DVD players, and cell phones and permitted Cubans to pay for ser-
vices—such as hotel rooms, food in tourist hotels, or rental cars—with Cuban

convertible currency. It also doled out land to individual farmers and raised
the prices it paid to farmers for produce. But Cuba still had not found a way to
generate enough hard currency to develop a sustainable and equitable economy.
While its gross domestic product had reached $100 billion, hard currency earn-
ings amounted to only 4 percent of the total. The country continued to spend too
much on importing food that could have been grown domestically.17
A CHANGING INTERNATIONAL LANDSCAPE
Cuba bought a record $711 million worth of food, agricultural equipment, and
medicine from the United States in 2008. Despite the embargo, the hovering
giant was the island’s fifth largest trading partner.18 The hopes of some Cuban
officials—that the purchases would encourage major US companies to lobby
for a changed US policy—were reinforced when Americans elected Barack
Obama as president in November 2008.
During the campaign, Sen. Obama said he would be willing to meet with
President Castro and he promised to end the Bush administration’s restric-
tions on travel to Cuba by Cuban Americans. The new US president also took
office with little obligation to Cuban-American hardliners. His margin of vic-
tory in Florida—204,600 votes—was large enough that he virtually did not
need any Cuban-American votes to win the state, though approximately 35
percent of their ballots were cast for him.19 He also had political cover created
by a flurry of proposals from several ad hoc groups made up of former US
government officials and members of Congress, leading scholars, and promi-
nent public intellectuals, several of whom had previously supported harsh
measures against Cuba. They shared a view that the existing policy under-
mined US interests in the Western Hemisphere and that the stable succession
in Cuba has “challenged the effectiveness of a half century of US economic
sanctions,” as a Council on Foreign Relations task force report declared.20
By 2009, all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere except the United
States had established diplomatic relations with Cuba. In November 2008,
Cuba became a full member of the Rio Group, an informal association of
twenty-three regional countries that formalized itself in 2011 as the Com-
munity of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC in the Spanish
acronym) and seemed to offer a potential challenge to the OAS as the main
forum for handling hemispheric issues.
President Obama seemed aware of the changing landscape as he an-
nounced just prior to an April 2009 Summit of the Americas that he had abol-
ished all restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans and he would
permit them to send unlimited funds to families. But the Latin Americans’
304 Chapter 23
lackluster response—that his moves were little more than the fulfillment
of a campaign promise—reflected Cuba’s own disappointment. To be sure,
there was a marked change in tone coming from Washington, as the Obama
administration restarted semiannual migration talks with Cuba and increased
diplomatic contacts at a slightly higher level than before. But the administra-
tion advanced no effort to chip away at the US embargo, remove Cuba from
the list of state sponsors of terrorism, or close down several programs that
harmed or threatened Cuba.
One project, the Cuban Medical Professional Parole (CMPP) program
created in 2006, was designed to encourage Cuban doctors serving abroad
to give up their citizenship and emigrate to the United States. By the end of
2015, the United States had approved more than seven thousand applications
by Cuban medical personnel.21 The CMPP was one reason a planned US-
Cuban cooperative project to help Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake
failed. Cuba was concerned that the US Agency for International Develop-
ment (USAID) would use the project to recruit Cuban doctors, and USAID
refused to provide assurances it would not do so.22
USAID was the lead agency in spending funds on covert programs that
Cuba considered to be subversive. In 2009, it spent $45 million on these
projects.23 The one that created the greatest obstacle for improved relations
involved Alan P. Gross, a subcontractor for Development Alternatives In-
ternational. The Cuban government arrested Gross in December 2009 and
asserted that his mission was “to establish illegal and covert communications
systems . . . intended to destabilize the existing order.”24 The State Depart-
ment claimed he was in Cuba merely to provide the small Jewish community
with telecommunications equipment that would enable its members to access
the Internet without Cuban government interference or surveillance. There
are about 1,500 Jews in Cuba; none had requested such assistance.
In fact, what Gross provided was sophisticated satellite communications
transmitters that included a subscriber identity module (SIM) card usually
available only to the US military or intelligence community. The SIM card
could prevent the detection of signals from the transmitters for a radius of 250
miles.25 The communications setup Gross established would allow a Cuban
enemy to communicate with its operatives inside Cuba, or allow subversive
groups to communicate across the island by tapping into the equipment that
Gross had given to Jewish communities in three Cuban cities.
Following Gross’s arrest, the State Department ended the renewed migra-
tion talks and refused to consider offers by Cuban representatives to discuss
a variety of bilateral issues. Judging that the Obama administration was un-
likely to make any major move to improve relations, the Cuban government
cut back its purchases of US exports to $533 million in 2009.
As US relations languished, Cuba strengthened ties with China and Rus-

sia. In 2007, China’s $2.3 billion in trade with Cuba made it the island’s
second largest trading partner after Venezuela. (China’s trade with all of Latin
America was $100 billion.) During a November 2008 trip to Cuba, Chinese
president Hu Jintao cleared the way for the state-owned China National Pe-
troleum Corporation to invest $6 billion in the expansion of a Cienfuegos oil
refinery, intended to produce 150,000 barrels per day, and the construction of
a liquefied natural gas plant. He also agreed to continue buying Cuban sugar
and nickel, and he “extended the second $70 million phase of a $350 million
credit package designed to repair and renovate Cuban hospitals.”26
On the heels of President Hu’s visit, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev
came to Cuba to celebrate the signing of several trade agreements involving
automobiles, nickel, oil, and the sale of wheat to the island. Russia’s deputy
prime minister Igor Sechin had made three trips to Cuba between August and
November 2008.
Brazil, Norway, Venezuela, and Spain also showed an interest in explor-
ing Cuba’s oil fields at this time. Preliminary surveys showed that Cuba had
significant reserves offshore in the Cuban Mexican Gulf, ranging between
4.6 billion barrels, according to the US Geological Survey, to perhaps as
much as 20 billion barrels, according to Cuban estimates.27 But the possibil-
ity that oil would save the Cuban Revolution was, at best, many years in the
future. Raúl Castro had to solve Cuba’s economic and political problems
immediately.
NOTES
1. Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Celebration of the Attack on Moncada,” Cama-
guey, July 26, 2007, http://www.granma.cu/granmad/2007/07/27/nacional/artic01.html.
2. Yailin Orta Rivera y Norge Martínez Montero, “La vieja gran estafa,” Juventud
Rebelde, October 1, 2006, http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/cuba/2006-10-01/la-vieja
-gran-estafa.
3. Yailin Orta Rivera, “Desenmascaran falsificación de productos en redes com-
erciales del país,” Juventud Rebelde, February 25, 2007, http://www.juventudrebelde
.cu/cuba/2007-02-25/desenmascaran-falsificacion-de-productos-en-redes-comercia
les-del-pais.
4. Anita Snow, “Cuba’s Raul Castro Signals More Openness to Debate of Diver-
gent Ideas Than Brother Fidel,” Associated Press International, December 21, 2006.
5. Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech,” July 26, 2007.
6. Marc Frank, Cuban Revelations: Between the Scenes in Havana (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2013), 73–74.
7. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2009
(New York: 2009), 167–68.
306 Chapter 23
8. Fidel Castro, “Speech Delivered at the Commemoration of the 60th Anniver-
sary of His Admission to University of Havana,” November 17, 2005.
9. Oppenheimer, Castro’s Final Hour, 422.
10. Kapcia, Cuba in Revolution, 177.
11. Constitución de la República de Cuba (2002), http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/
cuba.htm.
12. Denise Blum, “Cuban Educational Reform during the ‘Special Period’: Dust,
Ashes and Diamonds,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al.
13. Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech,” February 24, 2008, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/
rauldiscursos/2008/esp/r240208e.html.
14. Erikson, The Cuba Wars, 319.
15. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Cambios sanos en el Consejo de Ministros,” Granma,
March 3, 2009, http://www.granma.cu/granmad/secciones/ref-fidel/art91.html.
16. Sánchez Egozcue, “Challenges of Economic Restructuring in Cuba,” 129.
17. Ricardo Torres Pérez, “Concluding Reflections of the Current Reform Process
in Cuba,” in No More Free Lunch: Reflections on the Cuban Economic Reform Pro-
cess and Challenges for Transformation, ed. Claes Brundenius and Ricardo Torres
Pérez (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 225.
18. US Census Bureau, “Foreign Trade: Trade in Goods with Cuba,” 2016.
19. Philip Brenner and Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “Untying the Knot: The Pos-
sibility of a Respectful Dialogue between Cuba and the United States,” in A Contem-
porary Cuba Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2014), 278.
20. Charlene Barshefsky and James T. Hill, chairs, US-Latin America Relations: A
New Direction for a New Reality, Independent Task Force Report No. 60 (New York:
Council on Foreign Relations, May 2008), 72, http://www.cfr.org/mexico/us-latin
-america-relations/p16279.
21. Victoria Burnett and Frances Robles, “US and Cuba at Odds Over Exodus of
the Island’s Doctors,” New York Times, December 19, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1S0CpLf.
22. H. Michael Erisman, “Brain Drain Politics: The Cuban Medical Professional
Parole Programme,” International Journal of Cuban Studies 4, nos. 3/4 (Autumn/
Winter 2012): 277–79, 284–85.
23. Fulton Armstrong, “Time to Clean Up US Regime-Change Programs in Cuba,”
Miami Herald, December 26, 2011.
24. Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, “Press Conference,” December 5, 2012, http://www
.minrex.gob.cu/en/press-conference-josefina-vidal-ferreiro-head-united-states-divi
sion-cuban-chancery-international.
25. Desmond Butler, “USAID Contractor Work in Cuba Detailed,” Associated
Press, February 12, 2012.
26. “China Signs Trade Deals with Cuba,” BBC News, November 19, 2008, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7733811.stm.
27. “Cuba Claims Massive Oil Reserves,” BBC News, October 17, 2008, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7675234.stm.
Chapter 24
Securing Cuba’s Independence

through Economic Change, 2010–2016
I have to take a day off a week because there is no other way to get my
father to and from the specialty medical center he needs to take care of his
illness. Meanwhile someone where I work has to back me up. And some-
times I have to back him up. So it is true that we have an extra radiologist
under normal circumstances who theoretically we don’t need. But because
of other inefficiencies in the society, we do need that. I don’t know what
they’ll do to force us to reduce the number, because it looks like we have
too many radiologists for the number of patients, but we don’t really.
—Radiologist at a Havana hospital, 20111
The impatience for change was conspicuous everywhere after Raúl’s first full
year as Cuba’s president. As he moved cautiously, the new president frus-
trated widespread initial hopes that he would make significant reforms imme-
diately. He eschewed describing the process as “change” or “reform.” Instead,
Cuban officials said they were “perfecting” or “updating” the Cuban model.
“UPDATING” THE CUBAN ECONOMIC MODEL
Downsizing and Decentralization

Despite his proclaimed intention to bring about comprehensive adjustments
in Cuba’s economy in order to secure Cuba’s independence, Raúl still had
not proposed a plan to rejuvenate economic affairs by the start of 2010. And
time was running out. Before he could implement any plan, the Congress of
the PCC had to approve it. The Congress met every five years and the next
meeting was scheduled for that very year. So he postponed the Congress and
doubled down on developing a program that could gain acceptance.
307
308 Chapter 24
The first major move came as a shock on April 4, 2010. Raúl announced a
plan to reduce the size of the state’s workforce by one million employees—
a cut of nearly 20 percent.2 Several problems had combined to lead to this one
solution. The government was strapped for cash to pay workers. If state work-
ers were laid off, officials reasoned, some might accept the government’s
offer of up to forty hectares (about one hundred acres) of free land on which
they could increase domestic food production. Cuba had spent 20 percent of
its hard currency imports in 2010 on food, especially rice, wheat, and animal
proteins such as chicken and meat.3
Raúl also believed that government workers treated their jobs as sine-
cures—guaranteed regardless of what they did—which encouraged sloth that
led to inefficiency and low productivity. “We know that the budgeted and
entrepreneurial sectors have hundreds of thousands of workers in excess,” he
charged. “Some analysts estimate that the surplus of people in work positions
exceeds one million.”4
As one might readily guess, popular reaction to the speech was negative.
Apart from the shock, the president was ignoring the reality of daily life that
Cubans endured, an example of which the radiologist at the opening of this
chapter described. From the radiologist’s perspective, redundancy in person-
The Guarantors of National Sovereignty and Independence*
Without a sound and dynamic economy . . . it will neither be possible to

improve the living standard of the population nor to preserve and improve
the high levels of education and healthcare ensured to every citizen free of
charge. Without an efficient and robust agriculture . . . we can’t expect to
sustain and raise the amount of food provided to the population, that largely
depends on the import of products that can be grown in Cuba. If the people do
not feel the need to work for a living because they are covered by extremely
paternalistic and irrational state regulations, we will never be able to stimulate
love for work or resolve the chronic lack of construction, farming and indus-
trial workers; teachers, police agents and other indispensable trades that have
steadily been disappearing. If we do not build a firm and systematic social
rejection . . . of corruption, more than a few will continue to make fortunes
. . . while disseminating attitudes that crash into the essence of socialism.
. . . We are convinced that we need to break away from dogma and assume
firmly and confidently the ongoing upgrading of our economic model in
order to set the foundations of the irreversibility of Cuban socialism and its
development, which we know are the guarantors of our national sovereignty
and independence.
* Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Ninth Congress of the Young Communist League,” April 4, 2010,
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/rauldiscursos/2010/ing/r030410i.html.
Securing Cuba’s Independence through Economic Change, 2010–2016 309
nel was essential, because “other inefficiencies” forced everyone to spend

time waiting in lines at bus stops, markets, and government offices. As a
result, few people whom we encountered believed the government would
enforce the announced layoffs. In fact, resistance to the plan emerged as well
from within the government.
In August, the president revised his numbers. He said that the reduction
would be more moderate—five hundred thousand would be dropped from the
state’s payroll, and much of the decrease would occur through retirement and
attrition. Nevertheless, he was adamant that change had to come. “We must
erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one
can live without working,” he told the National Assembly. Yet at the same
time, he said, the state would not abandon people “to their fate” and “will
provide the necessary support for a dignified life . . . to those who really are
not able to work and are the sole support of their families.”5
Downsizing state employment actually had been under way since 1992,
because of the exigencies of the Special Period. Recall that two-thirds of the
military had been retired from service in the early 1990s. In addition, the
government had started to redefine the responsibilities of central state institu-
tions in a slow process of decentralization. Some functions were transferred
to provincial governments and ministries gained increased autonomy to make
decisions.6 But until 2011, the decentralization process occurred very slowly.
Privatization
The pace began to change in April 2011 when the PCC approved a major new
program, “Guidelines for the Economic and Social Policies of the Party and
the Revolution,” known as Lineamientos, or Guidelines.7 Cuban economist
Juan Triana explains that the Lineamientos provided a fundamentally new
orientation for the society. The “consensus that without development it will
be very hard to sustain Cuban socialism,” he wrote, “is a departure from
the past in which socialism was the guarantor of achieving development.”8
Notably, Cuba’s leaders acknowledged that development might need to place
efficiency and growth ahead of values such as egalitarianism, and that this
reorientation would require a greater reliance on market considerations in
determining wages and even what enterprises produced.9
We can appreciate the importance the leaders attached to the Lineamien-
tos in seeing the process they used to finalize them. In December 2010, the
government circulated a draft document and encouraged discussions about
it in work centers, mass organizations, and schools. As a result, the initial
291 guidelines became 313 when the Sixth Party Congress took up the re-
port in April 2011. Only 32 percent of the original 291 guidelines remained
310 Chapter 24
unmodified. Some were combined with others, and thirty-six additional

guidelines emerged from the nationwide series of meetings.10
The 313 Lineamientos established a process for expanding the number of
permissible private (referred to as “non-state”) sector enterprises. It created
a commission that initially listed 181 types of jobs that could be performed
legally. Within two years, the commission added more than fifty other cat-
egories. The list includes mostly service jobs, such as barber or beautician,
electrician, bricklayer, plumber, photographer, waiter, truck driver, flower
seller, entertainer, sports instructor, and so on.11
In addition, several regulations were eased. For example, paladares—the
private restaurants in homes—were permitted to employ nonfamily members
as workers (see a paladar in figure 24.1). The rule limiting the capacity of a
paladar to twelve diners was changed at first to allow up to twenty diners.
Later, the limits were scrapped completely. Bed-and-breakfast accommoda-
tions previously were confined to rooms within a dwelling occupied by the
vendor. The modified regulation allows an entrepreneur to rent out a whole
apartment or house—which became the most popular option for Airbnb par-
ticipants when the company entered Cuba in 2015.
Previously, those applying for a license to open a private business had to
wait months for approval, which was far from guaranteed. In contrast, as
analyst Phil Peters notes, the first visible sign of a change as a result of the
Figure 24.1. Paladar Liliam in Havana. Photo by Giselle Garcia Castro.

Lineamientos was the opening of a street-front office in central Havana that

“posted instructions outside, assigned one staff member to answer questions
and direct traffic of applicants lined up outside, and assigned four staff to tak-
ing applications. . . . Most licenses were granted within five business days.”12
The half-million mark of registered cuentapropistas was reached midway
through 2015, though economist Richard Feinberg has argued that a more
accurate estimate of nonstate sector employment is about 40 percent of the
workforce—between 1.7 and 2.1 million people.13
The Guidelines themselves, and the way they were implemented in the five
years after the PCC approved them, roughly indicate the nature and extent of
privatization that Cuba’s leaders envision for the country. The vision has the
following features:
• Between 40 and 50 percent of Cuba’s workers would be employed in non-

state sector jobs, preferably by worker-owned cooperatives;
• The major resources of the country—nickel mines, oil fields, energy pro-
duction—would continue to be owned by the state;
• The state would maintain a near exclusive monopoly to provide education,
day care, and health care, though provincial and even municipal govern-
ments might gain more authority to engage in experimentation;
• Small, nonstate enterprises would provide many of the other services.
Updating Cuba’s Agricultural Production

Slightly more than 75 percent of Cuba’s population lived in urban areas in
2009.14 The plan to increase food production by enticing city dwellers to rural
areas with the offer of free land began that year, but there were few takers.
Aside from the expectation that the work would be difficult, the incentives
were low and the hurdles were high.
The program initially proposed to lease forty hectares to a family for ten
years, provided it worked on the land (figure 24.2 shows a farmer’s market,
while figure 24.3 displays a price list). But a family’s rights over improve-
ments—such as a barn—remained unclear. Additionally, the government
left in place bureaucratic mechanisms that interfered with decentralized
decision-making and created obstacles that prevented the quick processing
of loans and technical assistance or made it difficult for farmers to obtain
essential supplies.15 Political geographer Garrett Graddy-Lovelace reports
that there was a “thirty percent rate of food loss from field to store” in 2015
because farmers often lacked “bags, bushels, crates, and boxes to transport
harvested crops.”16
312 Chapter 24
Figure 24.2. A farmers’ market in Havana. Photo by Philip Brenner.
In 2012 and 2013, the government partially responded to the problems

by easing and clarifying some regulations, especially for cooperatives. The
area of land a cooperative (but not a family or individual) could lease was
increased to sixty-seven hectares (about 165 acres), and leases could extend
to twenty-five years instead of ten. Cooperatives also were permitted to sell
directly to hotels and other tourism entities instead of going through a state
entity. Both cooperatives and individual farmers were allowed to retain the
right to the structures they had built on the land.17 Even so, cooperatives ac-
counted for only 10 percent of land under cultivation by mid-2015.18
Meanwhile, through its urban and suburban farm programs, Cuba contin-
ued to promote agroecology, emphasizing a minimum use of fossil fuels and
locating producers close to consumers. Suburban farmers, though, faced ob-
stacles that are uncommon for urban farmers. Plots in the suburbs are larger,
which makes maintenance solely with human labor impossible. Transporting
produce to cities also is more difficult to sustain without the use of fossil
fuels for trucks. To overcome these hurdles, suburban farmers have relied on
Figure 24.3. The price list at the Mercado 21 y J indicates that staples such as sweet
potatoes cost 2.5 Cuban pesos per pound (about US$0.10 per pound); black beans,
US$0.40/pound; yucca, US$0.13/pound. The average worker earns about 400 pesos
monthly, or about US$17 per month. Photo by Philip Brenner.
314 Chapter 24
animal power—oxen teams—and the Agriculture Ministry set up collection

stations to which farmers can travel by carts to deposit their produce.19
CONTINUING ECONOMIC PROBLEMS
Halfway through 2016, President Castro told the National Assembly and the
country that the Cuban economy was suffering severe problems. Though
he dismissed fears that a “collapse of our economy” was imminent, he ac-
knowledged solemnly that it would be “imperative to reduce expenses of all
kinds that are not indispensable, to promote a culture of conservation and
the efficient use of resources available.”20 In fact, Reuters reported, “Cuban
companies are already slashing work hours and limiting the use of air condi-
tioning and cars in order to save energy.”21 Clearly, the reforms approved by
the PCC’s 2011 Congress had not updated the economy sufficiently. Much
still remained to be worked out after five years.
This was essentially the assessment that the Seventh Party Congress
made at the conclusion of its April 2016 meeting. It accepted a report that
stated only 21 percent of the Lineamientos had been fulfilled completely.22
Yet the Seventh Congress’s principal resolution offered almost no specific
plans for dealing with the problems. There had been expectations among
analysts prior to the Congress that it would approve some far-reaching inno-
vations because this was the last Congress over which Raúl would preside
as the country’s president. When the National Assembly reelected him in
2013, he said his current five-year term would the final one. Significantly,
the Seventh Congress did reelect him as first secretary of the PCC, and that
term will run until 2021.
While critics deride Raúl for making changes too slowly, there is no blue-
print Cuba can follow to achieve its goals of development with equity and
independence. Vietnam is sometimes cited as a model for Cuba. But the two
countries differ in significant ways that make it unwise for Cuba to adopt
Vietnam’s practices without careful modification. Vietnam’s population is
nearly nine times that of Cuba’s and its land area is three times larger. Even
though both states are nominally communist, Vietnam’s culture is closer to
a collectivist nature, while Cuba’s is closer to a Western individualistic one.
Two major sources of economic growth for Vietnam have been the production
of clothing and coffee. But Vietnam has notoriously terrible factory and farm
conditions that Cubans would be unlikely to tolerate. In 2016, Vietnam was
one of eight countries (out of seventy-five surveyed) that the US Labor De-
partment cited for using child labor and forced labor in its garment factories
and one of sixteen using child labor in coffee production.23
The absence of a worthy model to follow is one reason we cannot neatly

fit all the opponents of change in Cuba into one box.24 To be sure, there is
a group we would label as self-serving survivalists. These are people who
found ways to adapt to hardship through informal networks and illegal prac-
tices that economic reforms would disturb. Middle-level bureaucrats who
try to stifle innovation, merely because “old habits die hard,” also would
fall into this category.25
Yet there are three groups of opponents who seem to be acting from well-
intentioned motives. Resolute nationalists worry that some foreign invest-
ments could make Cuba vulnerable to the demands of another country and
vitiate Cuba’s sovereignty. In a similar vein, security-oriented skeptics view
an economic opening as a way for the United States to destroy the Cuban
Revolution. Even former US commerce secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez ac-
knowledged the legitimacy of this fear in remarking that some Cubans are
“wondering what the US intentions are and whether US policy is designed to
help the Cuban people or whether it is something more like a Trojan horse.”26
This concern is shared by those in a third group. Resolute socialists worry
that unfettered integration into the global economy will require Cuba to di-
minish beyond recognition its commitment to equity. They also fear that too
great an emphasis on the market will lead Cubans to replace values of social
responsibility and communal cooperation with extreme individualism and
consumerism, especially given Cuba’s proximity to the United States.
The situation of nonagricultural cooperatives illustrates how these motives
for opposing change may operate to slow down the process. A municipal
agency is able to approve a license for a cuentapropista—individual private
business—but only the Council of Ministers can authorize the operation of a
nonagricultural cooperative. As of mid-2015, there were a mere 329 function-
ing nonagricultural cooperatives, most of which were spun off from state en-
terprises located in Havana.27 At the same time, few licenses had been issued
for most private professional activities—legal representation, architecture,
business consulting, accounting—even though post-2011 regulations permit
such professionals to form cooperatives.
In a sense, President Castro acknowledged the legitimacy of opponents’
concerns by asserting, “We will continue the updating of our economic model
at the pace we sovereignly determine, forging consensus and unity among
Cubans in the construction of socialism.” He added, sternly, that the “speed
of changes will continue to be conditioned by our capacity to do things well,
since this has not always been the case.”28 Raúl’s general remarks about what
Cuba must do to solve its economic problems actually contain three specific
goals: (1) ending the dual-currency system; (2) acquiring hard currency for
development; and (3) meeting energy needs with fewer imports.
316 Chapter 24
Ending the Dual-Currency System

Recall from chapter 18 that the government initiated a dual-currency system
during the Special Period as a way to deal with the dollars from remittances
circulating in the country. The US dollar was legal tender in Cuba until
2004 when the government established that only Cuban Convertible Units
(CUC) could be used as hard currency. It also established two fixed rates of
exchange. The official rate used for international transactions is that one US
dollar equals one CUC, which in turn equals one CUP, the Cuban peso. But
domestically, the exchange rate was set at twenty-four CUP for one CUC.
One can imagine how difficult accounting becomes when an enterprise
needs to relate to a foreign firm, or must calculate what to charge for products
that include domestic and foreign components. The dual-currency system acts
to discourage foreign investors who need to rely on a consistent monetary
instrument. This is one reason economist Emily Morris concludes that ending
the dual-currency system would be “a greater step towards the transformation
of economic decision-making from the state planning system to the market
than the much-vaunted opening of the formal non-state sector, which still
only accounts for twenty-five percent of national employment.”29
A move to a unitary system would be quite disruptive for most Cubans. Cuban
leaders have been debating and negotiating how such a transition could occur
and what value would be assigned to the new currency in relation to the CUC
and CUP. The change would likely generate inflation and hurt those on fixed in-
comes, such as the elderly, and so any change would also require a revamping of
Cuba’s safety net and set of subsidies. Even before the 2016 economic decline,
Cuban economist Pavel Vidal reported that “a high proportion of the population
lives under conditions of extreme vulnerability.”30 Thus, it is understandable
why Cuban leaders missed the 2016 deadline for creating a single currency—
because the resulting shock and likelihood that many would suffer might have
been too much for the country to weather in precarious circumstances.
Acquiring Hard Currency for Development

No one disputes that Cuba needs to increase the amount of hard currency it
has available for development. But each of the three ways of obtaining hard
currency—remittances, foreign direct investment (FDI), and exports—gener-
ates its own problems.
Remittances
Estimates of annual remittances to Cuba range from $1.4 to $3.4 billion. In
January 2015, the Obama administration eased regulations to allow any US
citizen to send an unlimited amount of money to a family member in Cuba,

and up to $8,000 yearly to a nonfamily member. Remittances unquestion-
ably help individual recipients to endure hardships. They are also a source
of investment for some Cuban entrepreneurs. By one estimate, 80 percent
of the recently opened large paladares had expatriate funding behind them.31
But remittances carry the undesirable side effect of increasing inequality
and promoting conspicuous consumption. In addition, the government’s ef-
forts to capture the hard currency for development—through taxes, pricing
distortions, and fees—has diverted resources, generated antagonism, and
produced poor results.
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)

Foreign investors have tended to see Cuba as providing an unfriendly in-
vestment environment, even though regulations revised since 1993 grant
an eight-year period with no tax payments on profits, allow a non-Cuban
company to own 100 percent of an enterprise, and guarantee full protection
against expropriation. But Cuba still “requires all applications for FDI to pass
through a complex and nontransparent review process,” economist Richard
Feinberg observes, “raising obstacles not present in many other Latin Ameri-
can and Caribbean countries.”32 In addition, foreign companies have not been
able to pay Cuban workers directly because the government collects the hard
currency salaries from a company and pays its workers in Cuban pesos. For
example, a Cuban who works for a foreign news bureau in Havana such as
China’s CCTV might nominally earn 400 CUC each month, the equivalent of
about US$400. But the company pays the 400 CUC to the Cuban state, which
gives only 400 CUP (Cuban pesos) to the employee—the equivalent of about
US$17. Many companies then feel compelled to pay such workers additional
funds under the table without notifying the government, which raises their
employment costs.
These obstacles begin to explain why the extent of foreign investment
has been less—and concentrated in fewer kinds of economic activity—than
Cuban leaders projected. By the end of 2011, there were only 258 enterprises
in which foreign entities had made investments. (Among the top fifteen coun-
tries on the list, Spain had the highest number of companies with forty-seven;
Israel was fifteenth, with two.) Forty percent of these investments were in
tourism, with far lesser amounts in nickel, agribusiness (mainly citrus), con-
struction, communication, and transportation.
Consider the much-touted Special Economic Opportunity Zone of Mariel,
located about twenty-eight miles west of Havana. It consists of a new world-
class port that can dock the super-Panamax container ships from the enlarged
Panama Canal, the Mariel Special Development Zone (ZEDM), and a new
318 Chapter 24
Figure 24.4. Containers wait to be loaded on cargo ships at the Special Economic Op-
portunity Zone of Mariel. Photo courtesy of ZED Mariel (Special Economic Development
Zone of Mariel), http://www.zedmariel.com/pages/eng/Informacion_General.php.
rail connection to Havana (see containers in the Special Economic Opportu-

nity Zone in figure 24.4). Construction of the port facility, which cost nearly
$1 billion, was a joint venture with Odebrecht, the Brazilian engineering
conglomerate; the port is managed by PSA International, a Singapore firm.33
Cuban officials initiated the project to serve as a regional hub where large
ships can transfer containers from Asia to smaller freighters for distribution
along the Atlantic coasts of North and South America. Their current expec-
tations for the port are realistically much lower than hoped-for future re-
turns, which will be possible only when the United States lifts its embargo.
More troubling is the ZEDM. Covering 180 square miles, the ZEDM’s
plans include housing for workers and sites on which foreign investors can
build factories for goods aimed at the Cuban domestic market, as well as
international destinations. The government did ease some restrictions on
investments in the ZEDM so that it could almost serve as an export pro-
cessing zone, an area with no tariffs. But as of mid-2016, there were fewer
than ten foreign investors who had signed agreements for the ZEDM. Even
Odebrecht held off until February 2016.34
Exports
Cuba earned 17.9 billion pesos from the export of goods and services in 2014,
which was 18.8 percent of its total gross domestic product. However, goods
accounted for only 4.9 billion pesos of the total. Services included the work
of doctors, teachers, sports trainers, and other professionals working in other
countries. As Venezuela was the largest importer of Cuba’s services, the col-
lapse of its economy in 2016 was a major reason Cuba’s economy suffered.35
The increased number of tourists who flocked to Cuba in 2015 and 2016
partially replaced the benefits of trade with Venezuela and helped prevent a
major economic disaster from occurring. More than 3.5 million tourists came
to Cuba in 2015, and four million came in 2016. Yet as we have observed
in previous chapters, a reliance on tourism can undermine Cuba’s long-term
development because the jobs do not encourage younger Cubans to advance
their education.
Indeed, an important factor in holding down Cuba’s export earnings is that
officials do not take advantage of Cuba’s greatest resource, its educated popu-
lation.36 Cubans averaged 10.57 years of education in 2010—the “highest
level of any country in Latin America and the Caribbean and one of the high-
est in the developing world.” This level of educational achievement should
enable the country to make developmental leaps, Ricardo Torres argues, if it
created incentives for young Cubans to gain further education in foreign lan-
guages and information technologies. He notes, though, that “Cuba’s greatest
employment generators are not exactly sectors distinguished by the complex-
ity of skills required in the workforce.”37
Teenagers see little reason for advanced education in order to obtain farm
work and tourist industry service jobs. Yet apart from the pharmaceutical
industry, these have been the leading sectors for foreign investment. While
services abroad were Cuba’s largest source of export earnings and required
highly educated professionals, it was a precarious basis for earning hard cur-
rency because it depended so heavily on one country, Venezuela.
Strangely, for a country accustomed to central planning Cuba has allowed
the structure of its labor force to be determined by the market. In a sharp
critique of the “updating” process, Cuban economist Pedro Monreal almost
pleads instead for a “comprehensive strategic development plan.” The cur-
rent approach “is based on a relatively limited group of export activities,” he
astutely observes. However, the high education level “suggests the possibility
of a more diversified export profile in terms of the type of activities as well as
a greater number of export firms. . . . The country’s highly trained workforce
is large, but significant segments are not being utilized.”38
320 Chapter 24
Meeting Energy Needs with Fewer Imports

One of the hopes for Cuban economic development is underwater, literally.
As we noted in the previous chapter, Cuban geologists estimate the country
has oil reserves of up to twenty billion barrels. Cuba has leased to foreign
firms only one-third of the fifty-nine offshore drilling blocks it has mapped.39
The remaining blocks are those likely to have the most oil. Some analysts sur-
mise, according to an oil industry analyst who wishes to remain anonymous,
that Cuba had not leased those blocks in order to entice US firms to lobby for
changes in the embargo. But the increased availability of natural gas supplies
in the United States makes that scenario unlikely in the near future.
Most of the potential fuel in Cuban territory lies in deepwater trenches
off the northwestern coast. Cuba’s access to the deposits is contingent on
world oil prices—the expense of such deep drilling would be viable only
when the price of oil rises above $125 per barrel. Crude prices spiked
above that threshold briefly in 2008 and foreign investors did explore the
deepwater sites episodically between 2001 and 2013. But given the glut
of oil in the world market, Cuba decided in 2014 to shift “its focus away
from offshore oil, concentrating on renewable energy and improving out-
put from onshore wells.”40
Cuba produced domestically nearly 38 percent of the oil it used in 2013.41
Yet Cubans used 30 percent more energy in 2016 than in 2011.42 With low
Figure 24.5. The increasing use of automobiles has led to greater gasoline consump-
tion. Photo by Gabriela Veliz.
prices from Venezuelan oil disappearing, the cost of importing the oil that
Cuba needs has risen. Hence President Castro’s appeal for conservation and
reducing fuel consumption.
NOTES
1. Interview with Philip Brenner, December 8, 2011.

2. Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Ninth Congress of the Young Communist
League,” April 4, 2010.
3. Armando Nova González, “Cuban Agriculture and the Current Process of
Economic Transformation,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revo-
lution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 154;
Koont, “Cuba’s Recent Embrace of Agroecology,” 403.
4. Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Ninth Congress of the Young Communist
League.”
5. Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech at the National Assembly,” August 1, 2010, http://
www.cuba.cu/gobierno/rauldiscursos/2010/esp/r010810e.html.
6. Antonio F. Romero Gómez, “Economic Transformations and Institutional
Changes in Cuba,” in Cuba’s Economic Change in Comparative Perspective, ed.
Richard E. Feinberg and Ted Piccone (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press,
2014), 32.
7. Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, “Resolution on the Guide-
lines of the Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution,” April 18,
2011, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/documentos/2011/ing/l160711i.html.
8. Juan Triana Cordoví, “Moving from Reacting to an External Shock toward
Shaping a New Conception of Cuban Socialism,” in No More Free Lunch: Reflec-
tions on the Cuban Economic Reform Process and Challenges for Transformation,
ed. Claus Brundenius and Ricardo Torres Pérez (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 234.
9. Richard E. Feinberg, Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), 28–29; Romero Gómez, “Eco-
nomic Transformations and Institutional Changes in Cuba,” 33–34.
10. Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, “Information about the
Result of Debate on the Lineamientos,” May 5, 2011, http://www.cubadebate.cu/wp
-content/uploads/2011/05/tabloide_debate_lineamientos.pdf.
11. Feinberg, Open for Business, 140.
12. Philip Peters, “A Viewer’s Guide to Cuba’s Economic Reform” (Arlington,
VA: Lexington Institute, 2012), 12.
13. Feinberg, Open for Business, 135–39.
14. Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Informació, Anuario Estadístico de Cuba
2010, Edición 2011, table 3.5, http://www.one.cu/aec2010.htm.
15. Nova González, “Cuban Agriculture and the Current Process of Economic
Transformation,” 155–56.
16. Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, “United States–Cuba Agricultural Relations and
Agrarian Questions,” Journal of Agrarian Change (2017).
322 Chapter 24
17. Romero Gómez, “Economic Transformations and Institutional Changes in

Cuba,” 34–35.
2015: Agricultura, Ganadería, Silvicultura y Pesca, Edición 2016, cuadro 9.1, http://
www.onei.cu/aec2015/09 Agricultura Ganaderia Silvicultura Pesca.pdf.
19. Koont, “Cuba’s Recent Embrace of Agroecology,” 405–6.
20. Raúl Castro Ruz, “The Revolutionary Cuban People Will Again Rise to the
Occasion,” Speech to the Closing Session of the National Assembly, July 8, 2016,
http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2016-07-13/the-revolutionary-cuban-people-will-again
-rise-to-the-occasion.
21. Marc Frank, “Cuba Rationing Energy as Economy Minister Urges Spending
Cuts,” Reuters, July 5, 2016.
22. Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, “Resolution on the Re-
sults of Implementing the Lineamientos,” April 18, 2016, http://www.cubadebate.cu/
especiales/2016/04/18/resolucion-sobre-resultados-de-la-implementacion-de-los-line
amientos-de-la-politica-economica-y-social-del-partido-y-la-revolucion-aprobados
-en-el-vi-congreso-y-su-actualizacion-el-periodo-2016-2021.
23. US Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, Office of
Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking, List of Goods Produced by Child
Labor or Forced Labor (September 30, 2016), https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/
documents/ilab/reports/child-labor/findings/TVPRA_Report2016.pdf.
24. Philip Brenner and Colleen Scribner, “Spoiling the Spoilers: Evading the Legacy
of Failed Attempts to Normalize US-Cuban Relations,” in Cuba-US Relations: Normal-
ization and Its Challenges, ed. Margaret E. Crahan and Soraya M. Castro Mariño (New
York: Institute of Latin American Studies, Columbia University, 2017), 406–8.
26. Quoted in Steven Mufson, “On Cuba, as Politics Advances, Business Leaders
Wait for Their Breakthrough,” Washington Post, February 19, 2016.
28. Castro, “The Revolutionary Cuban People Will Again Rise.”
29. Emily Morris, “How Will US-Cuban Normalization Affect Economic Policy
in Cuba?” in A New Chapter in US-Cuba Relations: Social, Political, and Economic
Implications, ed. Eric Hershberg and William M. LeoGrande (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016), 123.
30. Pavel Vidal Alejandro, “El shock venezolano y Cuba: Crónica de una crisis
anunciada,” Cuba Posible, July 21, 2016, https://cubaposible.com/shock-venezolano
-cuba-cronica-una-crisis-anunciada.
33. Damien Cave, “Former Exit Port for a Wave of Cubans Hopes to Attract
Global Shipping,” New York Times, January 28, 2014; Eric Hershberg, “Cuban In-
frastructure and Brazilian State Capitalism: The Port of Mariel,” AULA Blog, Febru-
ary 20, 2014, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, American University,
https://aulablog.net/2014/02/20/cuban-infrastructure-and-brazilian-state-capitalism
-the-port-of-mariel.
34. Katheryn Felipe, “A Philosophy of ‘Surviving, Growing and Persevering,’”

Granma, February 5, 2016, http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2016-02-04/a-philosophy-of
-surviving-growing-and-persevering.
2014, Edición 2015, tables 5.2, 8.3, 8.4, http://www.one.cu/aec2014.htm; William M.
LeoGrande, “Venezuelan Contagion Hits Cuba’s Economy, Putting Reforms in Jeop-
ardy,” World Politics Review, August 1, 2016, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/ar
ticles/19522/venezuelan-contagion-hits-cuba-s-economy-putting-reforms-in-jeopardy.
36. Romero Gómez, “Economic Transformations and Institutional Changes in
Cuba,” 33.
37. Ricardo Torres Pérez, “Concluding Reflections of the Current Reform Process
in Cuba,” in No More Free Lunch: Reflections on the Cuban Economic Reform Pro-
cess and Challenges for Transformation, ed. Claus Brundenius and Ricardo Torres
Pérez (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 223–24.
38. Pedro Monreal González, “Without Sugarcane There Is No Country: What
Should We Do Now?” in No More Free Lunch: Reflections on the Cuban Economic
Reform Process and Challenges for Transformation, ed. Claus Brundenius and Ri-
cardo Torres Pérez (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 238–39.
39. Sarah Stephens, “As Cuba Plans to Drill in the Gulf of Mexico, US Policy
Poses Needless Risks to Our National Interest” (Washington, DC: Center for Democ-
racy in the Americas, 2011), 17.
40. Marc Frank, “After Offshore Oil Failure, Cuba Shifts Energy Focus,” Reuters,
August 11, 2014.
41. Anuario Estadístico de Cuba 2014, tables 10.4 and 10.7.
42. Frank, “Cuba Rationing Energy as Economy Minister Urges Spending Cuts.”
Chapter 25
Securing Cuba’s Independence

through Foreign Policy, 2010–2016
The waiting room at Cuba’s largest eye hospital, Pando Ferrer, is packed
with patients. Many come from across Latin America and the Caribbean,
with everything paid for by the Cuban government. Basil Ward is from
Barbados and is in Havana to have a cataract removed for free. “I could
have had the operation in Barbados but I would have had to wait a year,
there’s a huge waiting list there,” he says. Others do not even have that
choice; health facilities are almost non-existent or unaffordable in many
of the poorest parts of the region. Mr. Ward is here under a program called
Operación Milagro or Operation Miracle. . . . The Cubans have turned
mass production eye operations into a fine art. Pando Ferrer Hospital alone
can perform three hundred operations a day. Treatments range from cata-
racts and glaucoma to corneal transplants. . . . There are similar facilities
throughout the island as well as dozens of eye surgery centres which the
Cubans have opened across the Americas and parts of Africa. Operation
Miracle is just one part of an extensive international medical assistance
program, which some have dubbed Cuba’s “medical diplomacy.”
—Michael Voss1
As anticipated, once Raúl Castro officially became president Cuba’s foreign

policy did not depart much from the internationalist path it had taken under
Fidel. After all, the new leader had been vice president and minister of the
armed forces for more than forty years and was a partner with his brother
in establishing the path. Cuba continued to manifest a mix of pragmatic
calculations aimed at securing Cuba’s independence with altruistic elements
intended to assist and strengthen the world’s underdogs. Despite this continu-
ity, there were changes occasioned by new opportunities and challenges in the
period from 2010 to 2016.
324
Securing Cuba’s Independence through Foreign Policy, 2010–2016 325
AN OUTSIZED ROLE IN LATIN AMERICA
Even without Fidel as its leader, Cuba continued to play a role in Latin Ameri-
can affairs that was out of proportion to its size. But leadership changes in
Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, along with severe economic problems in Venezu-
ela and Brazil, undermined the bases for political and economic relations that
Cuba had developed at the start of the period.
Latin America itself had undergone a significant transformation during the
two decades prior to 2010. Yet US policy was still rooted in a century-old
hegemonic presumption, a belief in a “special relationship” of domination.2
The United States was the largest trading partner outside the region for most
Latin American countries in the early 1990s. But by 2010, their largest trad-
ing partners outside the region were China and Japan.
In addition, nearly every Latin American country experienced meaningful
economic growth between 1990 and 2010. Brazil’s GDP grew by more than
forty percent, and it moved from eleventh to seventh place in the world’s
ranking. Notably, Brazil’s growth was inclusive, bringing many more people
into the middle class than ever before. Along with Latin America’s reduction
in inequality and poverty, a growing middle class was a region-wide phe-
nomenon. These changes did not result from the “magic” of the free market
or reduced government spending as preached by Washington. Well-planned
government programs, such as the Bolsa Familia subsidy in Brazil, brought
about the improvements. In short, at a moment when Latin America was
feeling stronger and more confident than ever, countries in the hemisphere
no longer feared defying the United States by working closely with Cuba.3
Recall from chapter 22, that in 2004 Cuba and Venezuela had started an
ambitious project—ALBA—to integrate the economies of South America
and the Caribbean. With the price of oil still high in 2010, Venezuela was us-
ing subsidized sales and loans to purchase influence and goodwill that spilled
over to Cuba. ALBA’s program also appealed to a new group of leaders in the
region who had grown up admiring the Cuban Revolution.
Traditionally, the Organization of American States (OAS) had been Wash-
ington’s preferred instrument for hemispheric cooperation. But recent US
administrations had done little to buttress the OAS’s relevance, which created
a vacuum that Latin American countries filled themselves with several new
regional institutions. The one with the greatest potential is the Community of
Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC), whose members include
every country in the Western Hemisphere except the United States and Canada.
CELAC was formed in 2010 by the Rio Group, an organization founded
in 1985 to provide third-party mediation for the US-sponsored contra war
against Nicaragua. In 2008, the Rio Group reached out to make Cuba a full
326 Chapter 25
member of the organization. By the next year, the Rio Group had expanded
to include all the countries in South America, and it provided a semiformal
forum to discuss regional issues. Just prior to the group’s 2013 summit, the
European Union announced that CELAC, not the OAS, would be its coun-
terpart organization for biregional negotiations, which increased CELAC’s
importance. The 2013 summit meeting was held in Havana because the mem-
bers had chosen Cuba to co-chair the organization for that year. Their choice
was meant as a not-too-subtle message to Washington, which had prevented
Cuba from participating in a 2012 OAS-led hemispheric summit.
Also meeting in Havana were peace negotiators from the Colombian gov-
ernment and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main
insurgent group in that country. The negotiations began in mid-November
2012. This was not the first time Cuba had tried to help settle a major conflict
by serving as a mediator. Donna Rich identified seven instances during the
Cold War when Cuba played this role.4
The often bitter four years of talks between the Colombian government
and FARC concluded with an accord that the Colombian Congress ratified on
November 30, 2016. (After Colombians in a national vote rejected the initial
agreement signed in June 2016, negotiators returned to Havana and hammered
out final changes.) An estimated 260,000 Colombians had been killed during the
fifty-year civil war, and seven million were displaced.5 A non-Cuban observer
close to the negotiations told us in April 2016 that the Cuban mediators had been
essential in bringing closure to the last difficult rounds of deliberation. “There
would have been no agreement had it not been for Cuba’s efforts,” he said.
Colombia had perhaps the closest relationship to the United States of any
country in South America. It was the third largest recipient of US economic
and military aid in the world—an average of more than $700 million per year
for over two decades. Thus, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos’s stark
ultimatum at the end of the 2012 Summit of the Americas shocked US officials.
Speaking on behalf of the other heads of state, he declared that none would at-
tend the summit planned for 2015 unless Cuba were permitted to participate.6
Shortly afterward, President Obama fired his national security adviser for
Latin America. He then agreed to negotiations between Cuba and the United
States that led to the restoration of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014.
A DRAMATIC BREAKTHROUGH WITH THE UNITED STATES
Limited Changes in US Policy

Improved relations with Cuba and Latin America were not high on President
Obama’s agenda during his first term. He faced a deep recession at home,
conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that he promised to end, and a health care
initiative that he wanted Congress to approve. With respect to Cuba, he had
gone beyond his 2008 campaign promise. In 2009, he removed all restrictions
on remittances sent by Cuban-Americans in addition to reversing President
Bush’s restrictive travel policy for Cuban-Americans.
Cuban-Americans Increase Parcel Deliveries after Restrictions End
Brisk charter traffic between the two countries quickly ensued after President
Barack Obama ended restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances.
Nearly every flight leaving for Cuba was accompanied by a second plane just
to carry the cargo Cuban-Americans were bringing with them. The Cuban
diaspora in the United States was emerging as a new force that favored a
pragmatic policy to end the hostile relationship.
Figure 25.1. Cuban-Americans wait for their parcels at José Martí Airport in
Havana. Photo by Philip Brenner.
328 Chapter 25
Even so, in 2011 President Obama increased the level of remittances all
US citizens could send to Cuba and he eased some restrictions on educational
travel. While he had suspended the semiannual migration talks after the
Cuban government arrested USAID subcontractor Alan Gross in December
2009, US and Cuban officials did meet under the radar to discuss several
issues. These included monthly meetings to maintain peace and order at the
Guantánamo Naval Base fence line and regular cooperation between the
Cuban and US coast guards and drug enforcement agencies. In 2011, US and
Cuban officials also participated in multilateral talks on responses to oil spills
that might result from drilling in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Florida
Straits.7 One objective was to establish procedures for the Federal Emergency
Management Agency to transfer supplies and technology to Cuba via other
countries in the event of a drilling accident. The US embargo forbids a direct
transfer, even though much of the oil gushing from Cuba’s deep-sea wells
would wash up on Florida beaches if there were a malfunction.
But these actions were so limited that they had little chance of develop-
ing the trust necessary to overcome the distrust generated by fifty years of
hostility. President Obama also tied his own hands by framing Cuba policy
in terms of reciprocity, which conditioned US initiatives on changes Cuba
made instead of on the basis of US interests, as President Clinton had framed
US policy. The Obama administration followed the Bush administration’s
approach, and like his predecessor, President Obama tended to disparage the
significance of Cuba’s reforms.8 In the absence of a determined executive
branch policy on Cuba, the US Congress filled the vacuum to thwart any
reduction in tension. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who became
chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2011 (and was the rank-
ing minority member of the committee in 2009 and 2010) dominated Cuba
policy in the House. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who chaired
the Western Hemisphere subcommittee, controlled policy in the Senate. Both
were Cuban-Americans who had made opposition to improved relations their
first priority and both were repeatedly successful in browbeating State De-
partment officials and White House political operatives.
Raúl responded to US policy at the end of 2011 by once again affirming
Cuba’s determination to maintain its independence. Speaking to the National
Assembly, he declared that President Obama “seems not to understand that
Cuba made enormous and prolonged sacrifices to win its independence in the
nineteenth century and to defend its freedom.” He added that US “attempts to
convert a handful of mercenaries into a destabilizing opposition . . . does not
produce sleepless nights for a revolutionary people like ours.”9
Alan Gross’s continuing imprisonment impeded efforts to improve rela-
tions because Obama administration officials said they would not engage
in any negotiations until Cuba released him. Yet they also would not
acknowledge the seeming subversive purpose of his mission, which we
elaborated in chapter 23. This position left them vulnerable to conservative
charges that Cuba was holding Gross as a hostage in order to exchange him
for the Cuban Five.
A New Resolve in Obama’s Second Term

Several events and circumstances in 2013 offered renewed expectations for
improved relations. A new Cuban law enabled most citizens to obtain pass-
ports, to leave the country for up to two years without an exit permit, and to
return without forfeiting their property. The United States had highlighted
Cuba’s travel restrictions in attacking its human rights record.10 In May, with
the concurrence of the Justice Department, a federal judge permitted René
González, one of the Cuban Five, to stay in Cuba permanently after he was
allowed to travel there to attend memorial services for his father. He had
been released on parole in 2011 after 13 years in prison but forced to serve
out his parole in the United States. Then in November, speaking at a Miami
fundraiser, President Obama hinted at big changes. “Keep in mind that when
Castro came to power, I was just born,” he said. “So the notion that the same
policies that we put in place in 1961 would somehow still be as effective as
they are today . . . doesn’t make sense.”11
On December 17, 2014, Presidents Castro and Obama revealed what had
been in the works for the previous eighteen months. Very much behind the
scenes, in supersecret negotiations unknown even to Secretary of State John
Kerry, two senior National Security Council staff members had been meeting
with Cuban representatives.12 In statements delivered simultaneously from
Havana and Washington, the two presidents declared that their countries
would resume diplomatic relations.
President Castro also announced Cuba had released Gross on humanitar-
ian grounds and would also release fifty-three political prisoners. President
Obama said that he had commuted the sentences of the three remaining mem-
bers of the Cuban Five still in prison and returned them to Cuba. Cuba did the
same for a CIA agent arrested in the 1990s. President Obama also indicated
he would consider removing Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of ter-
rorism. (He did so in May 2015.)
In April 2015, Raúl attended the OAS-sponsored Summit of the Ameri-
cas in Panama, where he had a private meeting with Obama (see the two
presidents together in figure 25.2). It was the first time Cuba had partici-
pated in this conference, the series of which began in 1994. In July and
August, respectively, Cuba and the United States raised their own flags
330 Chapter 25
Figure 25.2. Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama meet at the Summit of the
Americas in April 2015. Official White House Photo by Amanda Lucidon.
over their former embassy buildings that had served, formally, as “interests
sections” of the Swiss Embassy.
While the restoration of diplomatic relations was a historic step for both
countries, it was not the same as restoring normal relations between them. In
fact, Cuba and the United States could not restore a normal relationship because
one never existed, as we have elaborated throughout this book. Not when Cuba
was a Spanish colony; not during the 1898 to 1903 US occupation; not during
the 1903 to 1933 period when the Platt Amendment was in force; not during the
Good Neighbor period; not during the Batista years; and certainly not during
the period of hostility after 1959. Cuba and the United States needed to draw a
new map if they were going to travel the road from normal diplomatic relations
to normal relations, which is what they began to do in 2015 and 2016.
Making Headway and Building Trust

Headway was made on several matters, such as direct postal service and
flights by regularly scheduled airlines, which began in the fall of 2016. Some
key issues that were still under discussion at the end of President Obama’s
second term included migration, the Cuban Adjustment Act, and property
claims by citizens of both countries. Issues that Cuba wanted to consider but
US negotiators would not discuss were the US occupation of the naval base
at Guantánamo Bay, the US embargo, and US activities that Cuba considers
subversive, such as so-called democracy promotion programs. The resolution
of differences on these issues unquestionably would contribute to the devel-
opment of a normal relationship. Yet the essential element needed to achieve
normalcy is trust.
Policymakers in both countries were discovering that building trust was
more difficult than they imagined, because of the long legacy of distrust
between Cuba and the United States. Consider that even as many Cubans
celebrated the December 17 announcements on diplomatic relations, former
president Fidel Castro waited more than five weeks to issue a comment. In
a letter to the Cuban Federation of University Students in January 2015 he
wrote, “I do not trust the policy of the United States, nor have I exchanged a
word with them, but this is not, in any way, a rejection of a peaceful solution
to conflicts.”13 Similarly, Fidel was critical of President Obama’s lack of em-
pathy about the history of Cuban deaths caused by US actions when the US
president visited Cuba in March 2016. He wrote in Granma,
Obama made a speech in which he uses the most sweetened words to express:
“It is time, now, to forget the past. . . .” I suppose all of us were at risk of a
heart attack upon hearing these words from the President of the United States.
After a ruthless blockade that has lasted almost 60 years, and what about those
who have died in the mercenary attacks on Cuban ships and ports, an airliner
full of passengers blown up in midair, mercenary invasions, multiple acts of
violence and coercion?14
Both Cuban and US officials have often described their frustrations in

dealing with the other country’s representatives. In part, this reflects circum-
stances where the United States is determined to bend Cuba to its will—to
make it behave like a small country in the US sphere of influence—and Cuba
displays an even greater determination not to bend. This kind of confronta-
tion shaped the relationship during the Cold War and continued to infuse
relations after the Cold War, even as the two countries negotiated the opening
of embassies in January 2015. For example, when US Assistant Secretary
of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta S. Jacobson said at a press
conference that “we pressed the Cuban government for improved human
rights conditions,” Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, Cuba’s lead negotiator, responded
sharply, “Cuba has never responded to pressure.”15
As the United States and Cuba move haltingly toward a normal relation-
ship, their empathetic skills will need finer tuning. Greater empathy will
require US policymakers to discard their traditional arrogance, a result of
332 Chapter 25
both US invulnerability and the ideology of American exceptionalism. Cuban

officials will need to overcome a tendency to be hypervigilant, which in part
has been a reaction to Cuba’s vulnerability and the result of a national secu-
rity ideology that its vulnerability engendered.
SOFT POWER
The notion of “soft power” itself is ancient. But it has become associated
with political scientist Joseph Nye, who coined the term in 1990 and has
since elaborated the concept. “Hard power” involves coercion. “Soft power,”
Nye explains, is “the ability to affect others through the co-optive means of
framing the agenda, persuading, and eliciting positive attraction in order to
obtain preferred outcomes.”16 Cuba’s medical internationalism is one aspect
of what observers describe as its “soft power.” By the end of 2016, Cuba
still had more than forty thousand health workers spread out over sixty-eight
countries. Its commitment in 2011was greater than the total number of medi-
cal personnel from all the G-8 countries combined.17
Even President Obama acknowledged that Cuba’s soft power might be the
kind of influence the United States should deploy in the hemisphere. Address-
ing the 2009 Summit of the Americas, he noted that when Latin American
leaders spoke about Cuba, they “talked very specifically about the thousands
of doctors from Cuba . . . upon which many of these countries heavily depend.
And it’s a reminder for us in the United States that if our only interaction with
many of these countries is drug interdiction . . . then we may not be develop-
ing the connections that can, over time, increase our influence.”18
If we look back at Cuba’s foreign policy in only this century, we see
repeated examples of how Cuba has used the resources Nye identifies. In
addition to medical internationalism, it has made itself a center for regional
culture events with an arts festival (Havana Biennial) and annual jazz and
film festivals. Sandra Levinson notes that the “Havana Biennial has become
a major showcase for ‘Third World’ art, an incredible accomplishment and
commitment given Cuba’s financial constraints.”19 Latin Americans accord
the annual writing prizes from Casa de las Americas the level of prestige that
the Pulitzer Prize has in the United States. Cuban music, films, and art—and,
of course, Che Guevara T-shirts—are popular throughout the world. The
global appreciation for Cuban culture took off during the Special Period
when the government permitted artists and musicians to earn money abroad
because it could no longer afford to support them. The Internet subsequently
gave them the possibility of getting worldwide exposure.
In the regional organizations with which it engages, Cuba focuses on goals
it has long advocated, such as the alleviation of poverty, which also provide
a basis for countries to work together. As Michael Erisman observes, ALBA

and CELAC are rooted in a common framework about development and
independence. “Both view integration in more than simply economic terms,
seeking also to promote political, social, economic, and cultural unity as well
as sustainable development,” he explains.20
At CELAC’s January 2016 summit, the heads of state approved a twenty-
eight item “Action Plan.” Note how closely the first five subjects correspond
to priorities that Fidel and Raúl have articulated as central to the promotion
of development with equity: food security and the eradication of hunger and
poverty; family farming; prevention and fight against corruption; promoting
equity, equality, and the empowerment of women; and elimination of racial
and ethnic discrimination against people of African descent.21 At a time when
Venezuela can no longer entice support for such an emphasis with the prom-
ise of cheap oil, it does appear that the attractiveness of the ideas and values
that Cuba espouses has enabled it to shape CELAC’s agenda.
Small states historically have sought to use international organizations
as a means of enhancing their power vis-à-vis a large powerful neighbor.22
“Cuba’s diplomatic successes in recent years are almost wholly attributable
to the island’s soft power,” Julia Sweig and Michael Bustamante observe.23
Certainly Cuba’s most notable success vis-à-vis the United States was gaining
participation in the 2015 Summit of the Americas. In effect, the political sup-
port Latin American countries gave to Cuba was enough to counter the hard
power—military strength and financial levers—the United States tradition-
ally used in dominating the hemisphere. It was an instance of what political
scientist Tom Long terms “collective foreign policy,” where a small country
can influence a larger one as a result of its “ability to win international allies
and to work with other small and medium states.”24
Cuba’s pursuit of soft power provides an example of the kind of balanc-
ing act it has had to perform in recent years. John Kirk points out that the
Lineamientos stress “the need to seek financial self-sufficiency while also re-
peating Cuba’s ongoing internationalist solidarity.”25 As a result, while Cuba
expanded its medical internationalism program, it raised the cost for countries
that could afford to pay for services. It was able to use those earnings, then, to
increase the number of personnel in poor countries such as Botswana where
it is not compensated.
Raúl has relied on soft power to enhance Cuba’s ability to defend its sov-
ereignty. While he has introduced some changes in the financing of interna-
tional projects, he has not abandoned the genuine humanitarianism that has
been an integral component of Cuba’s internationalism and that has made
Cuba so attractive to other third world countries.
334 Chapter 25
NOTES
1. Michael Voss, “Cuba Pushes Its ‘Medical Diplomacy,’” BBC News, May 20,
2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8059287.stm.
2. The phrase and concept is from Abraham F. Lowenthal, “The United States
and Latin America: Ending the Hegemonic Presumption,” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1
(October 1976).
3. Philip Brenner, “The Implications of Political and Socio-Economic Changes
in Latin America,” in Political and Socio-Economic Change: Revolutions and Their
Implications for the US Military, ed. John R. Deni (Carlisle, PA: US Army War Col-
lege Press, 2014), 46–50.
4. Donna Rich, “Cuba’s Role as Mediator in International Conflicts: Formal and
Informal Initiatives,” in Cuban Foreign Policy Confronts a New International Order,
ed. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991).
5. Virginia Bouvier, “Q&A: Colombia Cease-Fire Accord Marks Historic
Turn,” United States Institute for Peace, June 24, 2016, http://www.usip.org/publica
tions/2016/06/24/qa-colombia-cease-fire-accord-marks-historic-turn.
6. Brian Ellsworth, “Despite Obama Charm, Americas Summit Boosts US Isola-
tion,” Reuters, April 16, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-americas-summit
-obama-idUSBRE83F0UD20120416.
8. Pascal Fletcher, “Obama Wants ‘Real Change’ in Cuba before Normal Ties,”
Reuters, May 13, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cuba-obama-idUSTRE
74C3P820110513.
9. Raúl Castro Ruz, “Speech at the National Assembly of People’s Power,” De-
cember 23, 2011, Granma, December 26, 2011.
10. US Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for
2012, Cuba, April 19, 2013, http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport/
index.htm?year=2012&dlid=204441.
11. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at a DSCC Fundraising Recep-
tion,” November 8, 2013, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/11/08/
remarks-president-dscc-fundraising-reception-0.
12. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, chapter 10.
13. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Para mis compañeros de la Federación Estudiantil Univer-
sitaria,” Granma, January 26, 2015, authors’ translation. The Spanish version reads:
“No confío en la política de Estados Unidos,” which could be translated as “I do not
trust US politics.”
14. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Brother Obama,” Granma, March 28, 2016, http://en.granma
.cu/cuba/2016-03-28/brother-obama.
15. Bradley Klapper and Michael Weissenstein, “US, Cuba Move toward Embas-
sies, Disagree on Human Rights,” Associated Press, January 23, 2015.
16. Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, no. 80 (Autumn 1990);
Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power: Its Changing Nature and Use in the Twenty-
First Century (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 20–21.
17. John M. Kirk, “Cuban Medical Internationalism under Raúl Castro,” in A

Contemporary Cuba Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield 2014), 251.
18. Barack Obama, “Press Conference by the President in Trinidad and Tobago,”
April 19, 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/press-conference-presi
dent-trinidad-and-tobago-4192009.
19. Sandra Levinson, “Nationhood and Identity in Contemporary Cuban Art,” in
A Contemporary Cuba Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
20. H. Michael Erisman, “Raúlista Foreign Policy: A Macroperspective,” in A
Littlefield, 2014).
21. Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, “2016 CELAC AC-
TION PLAN,” January 27, 2016, http://www.itamaraty.gov.br/images/ed_integracao/
IV_CELAC_SUMMIT_2016ActionPlan_ENG.pdf.
22. Tom Long, Latin America Confronts the United States: Asymmetry and Influ-
ence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12–18; William M. LeoGrande,
“The Danger of Dependence: Cuba’s Foreign Policy After Chavez,” World Politics
Review, April 2, 2013, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/12840/the-dan
ger-of-dependence-cubas-foreign-policy-after-chavez.
23. Michael J. Bustamante and Julia E. Sweig, “Cuban Public Diplomacy,” in A
24. Long, Latin America Confronts the United States, 224.
25. Kirk, “Cuban Medical Internationalism under Raúl Castro,” 257.
Chapter 26
Change, Continuity, and the Future
Apparently, some people used to embrace the illusion that revolution-

ary Cuba existed almost on another planet, and that in the ’60s and
’70s Cuba wasn’t as homophobic as the rest of the world. It would have
been marvelous had that been the case. . . . Prevailing ideas still tend to
devalue these [LGBT] individuals and deny them equal opportunities.
. . . Homophobia in Cuba and throughout the world is manifested through
acts of both physical and psychological violence. Nevertheless, the many
years of the Revolution have succeeded in instilling a certain sense of the
value of social solidarity and the necessity of a positive reaction when
countering injustice. . . . [W]hen inaugurating the National Days Against
Homophobia in 2008, Cuba was likewise signaling its desire to re-visit
its history. . . . Previously, there was little discussion of these matters
and when discussion did occur, it was only to dismiss, indeed, exclude
LGBT people. But today Cuban society is engaged in discussing and
exposing many points of view, doubts and contradictions. . . . The fact
remains that the very experimentation that is Socialism cannot tolerate
discrimination of any kind.
—Mariela Castro Espín1
A visitor to Cuba in 2016 would have witnessed a historic process unfolding

and seen a far different Cuba than when Raúl Castro became president—
more open, vibrant, bustling. Some Cubans complained that they were only
running in place, that the changes they wanted had not materialized. Still,
Cubans are inventive, creative, and entrepreneurial, and these characteristics
were flourishing in a myriad of ways that touched their daily lives. Consider
the old US Chevrolets, Plymouths, and Lincolns that became a postcard hall-
mark of the country. Typically, the engine in one of these “American” cars
originally propelled a Russian Lada; its brakes were from a Japanese Sentra;
336
Change, Continuity, and the Future 337
and the transmission relied on gears jerry-rigged from a Czech tractor. Ur-
ban farms and organic food producers were teaming up with master chefs at
new paladares to create novel restaurant experiences. Scientists at the Centro
Ingenieria Genética y Biotechnología (Center for Genetic Engineering and
Biotechnology) had developed a drug that can prevent diabetes sufferers from
losing their limbs (figure 26.1 shows the center). Without access to this medi-
cine because of the embargo, an estimated seventy-three thousand Americans
with diabetes have had amputations every year.2 In 2016, the US Food and
Drug began tests to evaluate a vaccine the genetic engineering center had
developed to prevent lung cancer.
Figure 26.1. The Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology has been a source
of several life-saving pharmaceuticals. Photo by Peter Eisner.
338 Chapter 26
However, Cubans do not like taking orders or falling in line. Before 1959,
Cuban Catholics had the lowest church attendance in the hemisphere—be-
low 5 percent.3 Communist leaders have been similarly chagrined by the
lackadaisical participation of party members. “The Cuban says no, and
means it, to all authority; to bosses, kings, generals, presidents, colonels,
commanders, doctors,” Carlos Franqui, the propaganda chief of the July
26th Movement and editor of Revolución who left the country permanently
in 1968, observed. “Cuba is an island of immigrants and émigrés,” he
added. “In constant movement and danger. Coveted by the great powers.
Invaded by buccaneers and pirates. Occupied by Spaniards, Britons, North
Americans. An island of . . . rebellion itself.”4
Imagine corralling this whirling dervish of a people onto one boat to travel
along a single river. Add to the scenario the social changes that occurred from
2010 to 2016. Then imagine Raúl Castro’s frustration in trying to bring an
orderly updating to the Revolution.
SOCIAL CHANGE FROM 2010 TO 2016
Greater Open Expression

In 2012, Cuba’s Ministry of Culture and the National Book Institute awarded
the National Literature Prize to Leonardo Padura for The Man Who Loved
Dogs. The significance of the decision to give Padura the country’s most pres-
tigious award for writing was not lost on anyone: it was an open acceptance of
dissent. All of Padura’s detective novels had a political edge, exposing some
form of corruption beneath the official façade of normalcy. The Man Who
Loved Dogs, from which we quoted a brief passage in chapter 9, is an epic
work that weaves three stories into one. Each challenges an aspect of Cuba’s
politics, ideological rigidity, or seemingly blind adherence to Soviet dogmas.
The central story concerns the assassination of Leon Trotsky, an early Soviet
leader. Padura portrays Trotsky as the Soviet leader whose values and goals
most closely reflected the ideals of the Cuban revolution. In contrast, his
depiction of Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, reveals Stalin’s pernicious-
ness and the callousness of his devotees. Even though Soviet governments
after Stalin discredited some of the dictator’s actions, they had not resurrected
Trotsky from the ignominy Stalin bestowed on him. Cuba had officially fol-
lowed the Soviet lead in this regard, which made the novel a biting critique
of the alleged hypocrisy and opportunism of Cuba’s leaders.
Padura’s award was just one of many ways Cubans found the heavy hand
of the government easing off under Raúl’s leadership, giving them a sense
that they could express themselves more freely. Peter Eisner, for example,
met numerous Cubans willing to speak with him openly about their economic
hardships in television interviews for the PBS program World Focus. A
woman dentist in her twenties whom he stopped while she was strolling one
evening on the Avenida de los Presidentes—which was crowded with young
people hanging out, listening to music, singing, and dancing spontaneously—
said that she saw health as a growing problem. She felt too many Cuban doc-
tors were going overseas, degrading medical care at home. A young man said
that he felt his university training had thus far in his life gone to waste. “We
shouldn’t have spent five years in college in vain,” he remarked. “Someday
this is going to have to change.”5
The US media often has presented an exaggerated image of Cuba as a
closed society where everyone is afraid to express a critical opinion lest a
“Rapid Response Brigade” swarm the critic’s home and trash it.6 To be sure,
the government has repressed dissent, imprisoned Cubans for what they have
written or produced artistically, and attempted to control information. This
behavior can be partly explained by Cuban leaders’ tendency to perceive that
their context is akin to the kind of extreme threat US leaders perceived after
September 11, 2001, which also led to the denial of some civil liberties. After
all, the goal of US policy—to overthrow the Cuban government—is explicit
in the law governing the embargo. What becomes significant, therefore, is the
relaxation of some controls and the reduction in fear we found when someone
criticizes the government or PCC, not the continuation of some repression,
which will take time to overcome.
Prior to the 2011 PCC Congress, the government itself encouraged active
debate about the Lineamientos, and “there were calls for a change of mental-
ity among leaders and administrators . . . to listen to the population,” econo-
mist Jorge Mario Sánchez noted. Meanwhile, he added, “the press began to
publish letters and articles exposing wrong or arbitrary decisions in state
enterprises and ministries to public scrutiny.”7
The shift toward greater freedom of expression actually began before Raúl
became president. Temas magazine, for example, celebrated its twentieth
anniversary in 2015.8 By publishing articles on topics rarely covered in the
official media and with views well outside the mainstream, the magazine
has helped to expand the borders of what is acceptable. Its January/March
2002 issue, for example, focused on the sensitive subject of “Identity and
Multiculturalism” and as usual included both Cuban and foreign authors. In
a similar way, its July/September 2012 issue examined the subject of “Social
Development,” which included an article about the lack of social mobility and
the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next.
Temas was protected initially by Abel Prieto Jiménez, a journalist and nov-
elist who became minister of culture in 1997. By 2012, we were told, when
340 Chapter 26
Prieto stepped down from the post, even usually doctrinaire officials such as
Esteban Lazo Hernández, president of the National Assembly and a former
Political Bureau member, backed the magazine.
Prieto returned as culture minister in 2016. While his role in championing the
free expression of artists and writers had been essential, he was not alone. The
Catholic Church also made an important contribution. As early as 1968, when
the Cuban bishops’ conference issued pastoral letters in support of the Revolu-
tion’s social justice goals, the Church began efforts to reduce the breach that
had occurred with the government. Nearly thirty years later, in 1994, Cardinal
Jaime Ortega y Alamino, the archbishop of Havana, asserted that “the Catholic
Church had a duty to help preserve the achievements of the revolution.”9
After 1992, the government permitted the church to disseminate its publi-
cations to a larger audience. Cardinal Ortega used this opportunity to create
Palabra Nueva (New Word), a magazine that became a pioneer in the move-
ment for greater openness.10 Under Orlando Márquez Hidalgo, the inspiring
editor who founded and directed the magazine from 1992 to 2016, Palabra
Nueva provided both information and challenging ideas that linked church
teachings to a range of nonreligious subjects. Márquez told a Washington,
DC, audience in 2013 that in his view, “talking about religion is not good
enough . . . we must include also other topics which are in the interest of the
population.” For this reason, he said, “we can write about the economy, we
can write about the society, we can write about sports, science, life, the ev-
eryday life of the Cubans—the hopes, the expectations, their frustrations.”11
Several of the subjects on which the magazine has focused—the way that the
current development strategy has encouraged consumption and increased im-
ports, contributed to underemployment, and weakened Cubans’ identification
with their country’s destiny—were subsequently “recognized by the highest
figures in the Cuban government.”12
In addition to editing Palabra Nueva, Márquez served as spokesperson
for the cardinal and the Cuban Conference of Catholic Bishops. From this
position, he worked with Cardinal Ortega to find common ground between
church and government officials, who had previously regarded each other as
fundamental antagonists. Their success was evident in the trust Raúl seems
to have accorded to the Church as “a valid, internal interlocutor for the first
time in almost 50 years.”13 In 2010, the Church was involved in the prison
release of fifty-two members of the group of seventy-five dissidents arrested
in March 2003. In January 2015, following up on the Cuban-US accord that
led to diplomatic relations, the Church again served as an intermediary when
the government commuted the sentences of fifty-three people the United
States had identified as political prisoners. (Current estimates of the number
of political prisoners by various organizations range from nineteen to fifty-

one. The government claims all these people were incarcerated for acts other
than speech, such as injuring people, damaging property, or espionage.14)
The Church also spawned Espacio Laical [Lay Space] in 2005. While it
devoted less attention to Church doctrine than Palabra Nueva, it also concen-
trated critically on economic and political issues and often broached topics
that had not been discussed in other Cuban publications. In October 2011,
Espacio Laical examined how the diaspora community could constructively
become involved in developing the Cuban economy. In January 2013, it pub-
lished a symposium that considered the need for a fundamental restructuring
of the media in Cuba to broaden and democratize participation in decision-
making.15 In part, producing that issue stimulated the editors, Roberto Veiga
González and Lenier González Mederos, to leave the magazine in 2014 in
order to create Cuba Posible—an ambitious project that is independent of the
Church. Cuba Posible organizes public forums, publishes a range of blogs
online, and tries to facilitate cooperative research among its growing network
of members.16 It already has acquired an international audience, and the
founders’ aspiration is that it will become a broad platform for the discussion
of Cuba’s problems and alternate solutions.17
Greater Artistic License

In highlighting some films made during the Revolution’s early years (chapters
9 and 10), we suggested that Cuban film directors may have had more creative
space for their talents and for criticism than other artists. Considerable credit
for that artistic license should go to Alfredo Guevara, the founder of the Cuban
Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), who died in 2013.18
Until the Special Period, ICAIC was the only distributor of Cuban films
and provided most of the support for production. But as film making with
limited resources grew ever more difficult, the government permitted film-
makers to search for funding outside the country. Coproduction gave them
the opportunity to explore subjects previously taboo in Cuba.19 This was ever
more apparent in the 2010 to 2016 period, with films such as Habanastation
(2011) on inequality, Revolución (2010) on underground culture, and Melaza
(2012) on the necessity to engage in petty corruption in order to survive.
Guevara himself did not shrink from confrontation in defending critical
filmmakers. In a memorable 1995 episode, Fidel denounced Guantanamera
as it began showing in Havana theaters. Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
and Juan Carlos Tabío, the film tells the story of the uncompromising, bu-
reaucratically oriented chief undertaker of Guantánamo Province who must
342 Chapter 26
transport a deceased person across the country to be buried. The six-hundred-

mile trip reveals to the audience, with humor, the multitude of nonapproved
ways that Cubans were engaged in resolviendo during the Special Period.
To Fidel, showing the film was like exposing Cuba’s dirty underwear to
the world. But Guevara shot back publicly, asserting in a television inter-
view, “We Cuban cineastes will be able to prove to the Comandante en Jefe
that . . . the language of the cinema is either the language of the cinema or
it isn’t cinema.” He added, “we’re on the right road, the road of clarity.”20
Fidel responded by backing down, acknowledging that he had not even
viewed the film.
Gender Rights
Guevara’s efforts had an even greater impact two years earlier. Journalist
Jon Lee Anderson assessed that Guevara “helped usher in an era of gradual
sexual glasnost” by producing Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)
in 1993.21 Also directed by Gutiérrez Alea and Tabío, the film examines the
developing friendship between a gay artist and a committed young commu-
nist who is willing to maintain the nonsexual relationship initially in order
to spy on the so-called deviant. It not only portrays a gay Cuban sympatheti-
cally; Fresa y Chocolate clearly criticizes the ways the government penalized
homosexuality in the 1960s and the lame excuses the PCC offered to justify
discrimination and repression against homosexuals.
Fresa y Chocolate was the first Cuban film to receive an Academy Award
nomination, and its appearance marked a turning point for lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual, and transgender (LGBT) Cubans. Less fearful about acknowledging their
orientations, they began to gather openly in clubs, perform as transvestites,
and speak out. While subsequent films reinforced their courage, unquestion-
ably the most significant support came from Mariela Castro Espín, a daughter
of Raúl Castro and the late Vilma Espín.
From her position as director of the National Center of Sexual Educa-
tion (CENESEX), Mariela Castro has carried on a crusade for LGBT rights,
which has diminished taboos against discussing the issue, engendered a na-
tional conversation, educated Cubans, and empowered the LGBT community
(see her leading an LGBT rally in figure 26.2).22 Consider that in 2008 the
Ministry of Public Health approved state-funded sex reassignment surgery
(which Mariela Castro had first proposed in 2005). Or take the case of Adela
Hernández, who was imprisoned “in the 1980s for ‘dangerousness’ after her
own family denounced her sexuality.” In 2012, Hernández was the first ac-
knowledged transgender Cuban elected to public office, as a delegate to a city
council in Villa Clara Province.23
Figure 26.2. Mariela Castro Espín leads an LGBT demonstration in Havana as captured
in the 2017 documentary, Transit Havana. Photo by Johannes Praus from the film.
In 2007, Mariela Castro took to the streets to lead a parade on the Interna-
tional Day Against Homophobia. This has grown to be a monthlong educa-
tional campaign, and she has prominently led the Gay Pride parades in recent
years. As an elected member of the National Assembly, she also has openly
challenged the government to approve laws that grant the rights to same-sex
couples that heterosexual couples have, and to change labor laws to include
rights for LGBT Cubans.
Increased Access to Information

The official percentage of Cubans with access to the Internet is one of the low-
est in the world. In 2013, less than 4 percent of the population had Internet con-
nections in their homes, and only 25 percent used the Internet.24 However, the
reality belies the data—Cubans have greater access to information from the In-
ternet than the numbers suggest—and even the official numbers are improving.
One reason for the inconsistency between the data and reality is that
younger Cubans have tended to use smartphones rather than computers for
their connections. A special 2012 report by the Economist magazine estimated
there were 1.8 million cell phones in circulation in Cuba that year.25 Cubans
also share information readily, passing on news via text messages and email
through Cuba’s intranet—a system for communication exclusively within the
island. Relying on old telephone lines and with painfully slow connections,
the intranet is accessible to more Cubans than the Internet.
344 Chapter 26
Recently, el paquete semanal has opened the world’s media to most

Cubans. Ever inventive, they now watch international films and television
programs by ordering a custom bundle from a neighbor who has broadband
Internet access and has downloaded virtually every popular program from
US and Spanish television stations. Once a week, a Cuban visits the sup-
plier with a USB flash drive to obtain his or her bundle of requests. We
learned from interviews in 2015 that the Netflix series House of Cards was
especially popular among university and government specialists who study
the United States.
The most recent data does not account for the government’s expansion of
broadband Wi-Fi access throughout the country, which began in 2015. By
mid-2016, it had created more than forty hotspots in Havana at which users
could connect to the web at a cost of about $2 per hour. To be sure, for a
worker who earns the equivalent of $25 per month, the cost of access made
it a rarely used luxury. But with increasing wealth, more Cubans were able
to link in.
Both political and logistical reasons account for Cubans’ limited Internet
access. Some high officials have worried that uncontrolled access would en-
able enemies to spread lies, foment dissent, and undermine the government’s
efforts to maintain political support for the system. The United States contin-
ued to reinforce these fears with supposed “democracy promotion” programs.
One multimillion-dollar program that the Associated Press exposed in 2014
was a Twitter-like campaign that enrolled about forty thousand unsuspecting
Cubans. Named ZunZuneo, it had the potential to incite the kind of flash
mobs that were prominent during the Arab Spring.26 Another USAID program
attempted to infiltrate “Cuba’s underground hip-hop groups scene to spark a
youth movement against the government.”27
Undoubtedly, there are officials for whom the national security rationale
of limiting information has served their own interest in avoiding exposure of
incompetence or corruption. And for some, old habits of secrecy and control
are difficult to abandon. Yet national security concerns cannot be dismissed
out of hand given Cuba’s vulnerabilities.
Logistical problems emanated from several sources. Technically, the
United States would have been the most desirable hub for Cuba’s access
because of proximity. But until 2015, when President Obama allowed US
telecommunications firms to do business in Cuba, the US embargo blocked
Cuba’s connection. Instead, Cuba turned to Venezuela for help in laying a
one-thousand-mile-long fiber optic cable under the Caribbean. But the cable
malfunctioned shortly before it was scheduled to go online in 2011. There
were unconfirmed allegations that Cuban and Venezuelan corruption led to
the purchase of low-quality parts, and in 2012, Raúl fired General Medardo
Díaz Toledo as head of the information and communication ministry, the

agency in charge of the project. The cable began operation in 2013, and in
2016, Verizon and AT&T signed agreements that enable their customers to
roam with cell phones in Cuba.
CONSEQUENCES OF SOCIAL CHANGE
Cuba’s Office of National Statistics and Information (ONEI) has projected

that the country’s 2015 population of 11.2 million people will rise gradually
for another ten years and then begin to decline. By 2050, it is expected to
be 10.8 million. Even more problematic, the percentage of the working age
(20–64) population will decline from 63 to 52 percent, and the percentage
of Cubans of retirement age will rise from 14 to 27 percent.28 The problem
of fewer working adults supporting an increasing number of retirees is not
unique to Cuba. Still, it is a demographic change that impacts several other
social changes occurring on the island.
Consider the 2013 removal of travel restrictions, a decision that carried
with it potentially costly side effects. Families where the parents previously
had counted on the state to provide social security, now looked to their chil-
dren as a source of support. They began to encourage their adult children to
work in other countries so that they could send remittances home, some of
which would be saved for retirement.
Retirement calculations also shaped decisions about homeownership. Until
2013, the common way to move from one home to another was by barter.
When a friend of ours remarried several years ago, he and his new wife traded
their two modest-sized apartments for a house. The couple who occupied the
house wanted to downsize, and the second apartment went to one of their
adult children who had recently married. However, in 2014, as our friend
edged closer to retirement, he realized that a monthly government pension
of 200 CUP (about $8) meant he would live out his days in hardship. His
solution was to sell the house, buy a less expensive apartment, and hope the
difference will cover the expenses of his retirement years.
For some Cubans, the new opportunity to buy and sell property—and
cars—has been invigorating. They see themselves as entrepreneurs, establish-
ing a bed and breakfast operation or a taxi service that will give them both a
good income and some personal independence (figure 26.3 shows one such
entrepreneur). Yet thinking about property as a substitute for social security
has been jarring for many people. More than 80 percent of the population in
2015 had grown up in a system that was based on the premise that the society,
not the individual, had the responsibility to care for the elderly.
346 Chapter 26
Figure 26.3. A self-employed entrepreneur (cuentapropista) on the left provides a

service of refilling cigarette lighters on a Havana street. Photo by David LaFevor, www
.davidlafevor.com.
Another potential side effect of the 2013 travel decision was a “brain
drain.” Better educated Cubans were those most likely to obtain good jobs
abroad. Their departure could lead to a loss of the country’s base for sustained
development and its most attractive resource for foreign investors. One rea-
son the government had maintained the travel restrictions for so long was to
avoid such a brain drain.
For some, the ability to travel legally offered them a way to emigrate
from Cuba. The number of Cuban applications for nonimmigrant visas to
the United States jumped from 14,000 in 2011 to 35,000 in 2014. The Flor-
ida Sun-Sentinel reported that as many as 40 percent may have remained
in the United States.29 Recall that the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act provides
an incentive for Cuban visitors to violate visa stipulations, because the act
grants resident alien status to a Cuban émigré one year and a day after be-
ing on US territory.
Historian Margaret Crahan astutely observed in 2002 that the inequalities
produced by the economic reforms in the 1990s reduced “traditional tenden-
cies towards community solidarity . . . fueling societal decomposition.”30 Yet
until 2011, many neighborhoods still retained their hold on residents because
of a cumbersome process to move from one house to another and severe
restrictions on travel. Even when a Cuban’s occupation might have provided
the ability to move, such a doctor or engineer continued to live where he or

she grew up.31 The freedom to buy and sell houses and to travel reinforced
the other forces that were already diminishing the importance of community
in Cuban social life. Similarly, without grandparents nearby to take care of
children and with a worker’s attention focused on a family’s individual ben-
efit, not the general welfare, Cubans experienced a loss of social cohesion in
the 2010 to 2016 period.
This depiction of the problems resulting from the social changes in Cuba
highlights the major obstacle Raúl faced in trying to upgrade the Cuban
model. For many Cubans, the changes that occurred did not produce posi-
tive consequences, and they resisted further reform, preferring the devil they
knew to the devil they didn’t know.
Yet for other Cubans, reform has created a new social structure in which
they are comfortable. In her study of the emerging class divisions in Cuba,
Hope Bastian Martinez found a new “middle class” in which some people
defined their class in terms of their ability to live in “decent” housing and
maintain food security while others defined class in terms of access to the
Internet and the ability to travel.32
Government statistics do not provide the kind of information that would
enable researchers to know the size of the new middle class, although schol-
ars at the University of Havana’s Center for Psychological and Sociological
Research have done path-breaking work in trying to calculate its size. Econo-
mist Richard Feinberg took a different route, deriving estimates from official
data on occupation, education, the number of workers who were employed by
nonstate entities or were self-employed. He concludes that “Cuba looks very
much like a middle-class society.”33 He surmises that it is likely this large part
of the population will be influential in shaping Cuba’s future.
THE FUTURE
Historian Louis Pérez, Jr., opens his masterful study, The Structure of Cuban
History, with an apt quote from a 2008 documentary: “How does one tell the
story of a country whose history is far larger than its size?”34 Indeed, how
does one conclude a history about such a country? We do so by pointing to
two constants evident in the Cuban Revolution: adaptation and continuity.
Adaptation
The Cuban Revolution has been an ongoing process, not a singular moment.
We examined in parts II and III of this book a society in continual flux as it
348 Chapter 26
matched its capabilities to the pursuit of its goals. Even when it seemed to
be standing still, there was a dynamism about Cuba, reflected at times in its
domestic or foreign policies and at times in its cultural achievements.
A look at Cuba’s leadership offers an example of the paradox about Cuban
dynamism. As we noted in chapter 24, when Raúl selected Machado Ventura
to be first vice president in 2008, there was widespread expectation that
meaningful changes would not be forthcoming. Yet beneath the top layers of
the PCC and the government, there was a sea change occurring in the leader-
ship. At the provincial levels in 2014, the average age of officials was about
twenty-five years less than for officials at the national level. Party chiefs in
the fifteen provinces were on average forty-six years old. Half were between
thirty-eight and forty-seven and the oldest was fifty-seven. Similarly, 80 per-
cent of the heads of provincial assemblies were under fifty. Rafael Hernández
reasonably argued, in presenting this data, that to the extent to which Cuba’s
institutions mirror the population and provide Cubans with a sense of empow-
erment, they will create new spaces for political action and impact the nature
of the “emerging order.”35
Dynamism was plainly evident in what Raúl Castro has done as president.
Cuban economist Jorge Mario Sánchez well summarized the process of updat-
ing the Cuban model as “a change in the basis of government, on a new and
irreversible scale, so as to eliminate once and for all the complacency, false
triumphalism, and social apathy . . . a negation of the culture and thinking that
have been years in the making.”36 Stated in these terms, “revolutionary” is a
fitting adjective to describe the fundamental changes that updating has entailed.
Evidently, Raúl saw the reforms this way because in his view they would
determine the very survival of the Cuban Revolution. Thus, he asserted that
changes had to be carefully planned and implemented, and there had to be a
“systematic review and timely rectification of possible missteps.”37 He would
not rush the process, but neither would he delay it.
The Death of Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro was the central figure of the Cuban Revolution. His death on
November 25, 2016, touched a deep sentiment in all Cubans. He was the
father of Cuban independence. Just as most people have conflicted emotions
about their own father, Cubans had many feelings about Fidel. But when he
died, they shared a common grief. We know critics and devotees who waited
together in line for hours to pay their respects at Havana’s Revolution Square.
As Louis Pérez writes in the accompanying textbox, “the success of his ap-
peal and the source of his authority were very much a function of the degree
to which he represented the authenticity of Cuban historical aspirations.”
Fidel Castro: A Life—and Death—in Context*
Seemingly implausible outcomes acted to shape much of the history attributed

to Fidel Castro: a revolution of uncommon breadth and depth in a country
that before January 1959 was thought of as hardly more than a client state, an
American playground, a place of license and loose morality; where the United
States “was so overwhelmingly influential,” Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith later
acknowledged, “the American ambassador was the second most important
man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than the President.”
That the government of Fidel Castro expelled the United States, nationalized
U.S. property, and aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union—and also survived
decades of U.S. efforts at regime change, including one armed invasion, years
of covert operations, scores of assassination attempts, and more than 50 years
of withering sanctions. It was precisely this implausibility that so tormented
the United States. Fidel Castro cast a dark shadow over the U.S. sense of equa-
nimity, a bad dream that would never go away.
Notions of injured national pride, of humiliation and embarrassment—all
attributed directly to the person of Fidel Castro—shaped the mindset with
which the U.S. fashioned policy toward Cuba. Fidel had to be punished, and
all Cubans would be punished until they did something about Castro. His mere
presence served as a reminder of the inability of the United States to will the
world in accordance with its own wishes, a condition made all the more insuf-
ferable by the fact that Cuba was a country upon which the United States had
routinely imposed its will. The Cuban revolution, personified by and personal-
ized in the figure of Fidel Castro, challenged long-cherished notions about
national well-being and upset prevailing notions of the rightful order of things.
Cultures cope with the demons that torment them in different ways and the
practice of exorcism assumes many forms. Castro occupied a place of almost
singular distinction in that nether world to which the Americans banish their
demons. Even in death, he was reviled and vilified, denounced as a madman,
a megalomaniac, a menace, a wicked man with whom honorable men could
not negotiate in good faith. Simply put, he was so irredeemably contemptible
as to make even being in his company seem akin to consorting with the devil
and the prospects of rapprochement appear an accommodation to evil.
Fidel Castro was in many ways defined through his confrontation with the
United States. His uncompromising defense of Cuban claims to self-determi-
nation and national sovereignty was a summons to which millions of Cubans
could respond unequivocally, without regard to political affinities. What reso-
nated in 1959 and in the years that followed was the very phenomenon of the
Cuban revolution, of a people summoned to heroic purpose. Fidel Castro was
the most visible representative of that people.
(continued)
* Excerpted with permission from Louis A. Pérez Jr., “Fidel Castro: A Life—and Death—in Con-
text,” NACLA, November 29, 2016, http://nacla.org/news/2016/11/29/fidel-castro-life%E2%80%94-
and-death%E2%80%94-context.
350 Chapter 26
Fidel Castro: A Life—and Death—in Context (continued)

The Cuban revolution triumphed in a larger context, at a time of decoloni-
zation movements in Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, the Caribbean,
and Latin America. To confront the United States in the name of national sov-
ereignty and self-determination catapulted Fidel onto the international stage,
as a powerful symbol to sustain Third World intransigence against First World
domination. That the Cubans could make good on their aspirations resonated
across the globe: Cuba as model, Cuba as example, Cubans defeating the
U.S.-organized Bay of Pigs invasion which, they boasted, represented the first
defeat of imperialism in the Americas. Cuban bravado reverberated across
Latin America. The resolve of the people on a small island in the Caribbean
served as a symbol of hope to peoples in distant continents.
It is also necessary to pause in the rush to ascertain Fidel’s “legacy.” The
biography of Castro is not the history of Cuba. The life of Fidel Castro was
contingent and contextual. The social forces that crashed upon one another in
fateful climax in 1959 were set in motion long before Fidel Castro. This is not
to suggest that the Cuban revolution was a matter of inevitable outcome, of
course. To acknowledge that the revolution was not inevitable should not be
understood to mean that it lacked an internal logic, one derived from the very
history from which it emerged.
However large a role Fidel played in shaping the course of Cuban history, it
bears emphasizing that the success of his appeal and the source of his author-
ity were very much a function of the degree to which he represented the
authenticity of Cuban historical aspirations. Fidel Castro was a historic actor,
but he was also acted upon. To explain outcomes of 50 years of Cuban pro-
grams and policies as a result of one man’s will is facile. Worse, it is to dismiss
the efforts of hundreds of thousands of men and women who contributed to
the deliberations, decisions, and actions that moved the history of Cuba since
the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada.
Fidel Castro bestirred the Cuban people to act with sacrifice and selfless-
ness, exhilarated by new possibilities and new promises, but most of all by
the prospects of a better future that seemed to be within their reach and
through their efforts—in a word, through their own agency. He was uncom-
promising about relocating power over Cuban life from foreign states to
Cubans, and making the purpose of power the improvement of things Cuban
and the affirmation of the prerogative of the Cuban in Cuba. He framed
the exercise of national sovereignty and self-determination as the defining
paradigm of the Cuban revolution which gave Cuba’s leadership a logic to
guide everything else.
In short, the legacy of Fidel Castro? The example of the Cuban people.
One authoritative source told us in December 2016 that Fidel was lucid
until the end, detailing arrangements for what should occur after he died. He
extracted a promise from Raúl that there would be no statues of him erected,
no small statues sold, and no streets or buildings named to memorialize him.
The National Assembly honored the request and passed a law a few days later
forbidding the production of statues, though many people sought to buy one.
The symbolism of the request was clear: the Cuban people, not Fidel, were
responsible for the Revolution.
Fidel also requested that his ashes be carried to Santiago along the same
route he took in January 1959, when he energized Cubans with a weeklong
victory march to Havana. Cubans lined the highway to bid him farewell.
They understood that the long funeral march was intended to serve the same
purpose, a renewal of vows to continue the revolution.
Continuity
Amid all the changes taking place in Cuba, there was a remarkable pattern of
continuity. Cubans did not set the island ablaze, as some American pundits
expected, when Fidel relinquished his authority to Raúl in 2006. Historian
Julia Sweig was spot on in characterizing the calm transfer of leadership as
“Fidel’s Final Victory.”38 When Raúl steps down as president in 2018 and
then as first secretary of the PCC in 2021, the transition is likely to be equally
smooth. No one expects the new leaders to abandon the three mainstays of the
Revolution: Cuba’s socialist system at home, its commitment to international
solidarity, and its determination to be independent.
To be sure, there has been considerable debate and little consensus about
how Cuba’s model of socialism will evolve, and whether it will include po-
litical changes that bring it closer to US ideals of democracy. But Raúl was
direct in declaring to the Seventh Party Congress, in April 2016, that Cuba
will continue with “a single Party . . . which represents and guarantees the
unity of the Cuban nation.” Unity, he acknowledged, will be more difficult
to achieve in the future, because the new economic model will lead to an
“increasing heterogeneity of sectors and groups in our society, originating
from differences in their income.” This is a situation Cuba’s enemies will
want to use to their advantage “to weaken us,” he warned, which is why they
demand that Cuba divide itself “into several parties in the name of sacrosanct
bourgeois democracy.”39
Similarly, there was no indication that Cuba will depart from its global
commitment to the poor. International solidarity is likely to continue being a
feature of its foreign policy. Yet the fundamental element of Cuba’s foreign
policy, former ambassador Carlos Alzugaray explained, is “the maintenance
352 Chapter 26
of the sovereignty, the independence, the self-determination, and the security

of Cuba.”40 This has been a Cuban quest for five hundred years, not merely a
posture adopted since 1959. The revolutionaries who gained victory in 1959,
and those who sought to continue the Cuban Revolution in the twenty-first
century, looked back not only to José Martí but to Hatuey, the Taino chief
who refused to bow to the Spanish. Independence and sovereignty are the sine
qua non of Cuba libre, the essential ingredients of a free Cuba.
NOTES
1. Mariela Castro Espín, “Socialism Cannot Be Homophobic,” La Jiribilla, no.

628 (May 18–24, 2013), Wallace Sillanpoa, trans., http://www.walterlippmann.com/
docs3816.html.
2. Andrew Schneider, “Cuban Drug Could Help Diabetes Patients Avoid Ampu-
tations,” Houston Chronicle, December 19, 2014, http://www.houstonchronicle.com/
news/health/article/Cuban-drug-could-help-diabetes-patients-avoid-5969300.php.
3. Margaret Crahan, “The Pope in Cuba: What Does It Mean?” Wilson Center
Latin American Program, September 21, 2015, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/
the-pope-cuba-what-does-it-mean.
4. Carlos Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Georgette Felix, Elaine
Kerrigan, Phyllis Freeman, and Hardie St. Martin (New York: Viking, 1980), ix.
5. Peter Eisner and Ara Ayer, “Social, Economic Change Is in the Wind in Cuba,”
PBS World Focus, March 9, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kr6r1njkYM.
We appreciate a note from Dr. Margaret Crahan informing us that in 2016 the Minis-
try of Higher Education announced it would be creating new degrees aimed at prepar-
ing students for the workforce.
6. González Echevarria, “Exiled by Ike, Saved by America,” New York Times,
January 7, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/opinion/07echevarria.html.
8. Revista Temas, http://temas.cult.cu.
9. Margaret E. Crahan, “Civil Society and Religion in Cuba: Past, Present and
Future,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip
10. Maximiliano F. Trujillo Lemes, “La Iglesia católica, la condición política cu-
bana y Palabra Nueva,” Temas, no. 76 (October–December 2013): 58.
11. Orlando Márquez Hidalgo, “The Role of the Catholic Church in Cuba Today,”
Brookings Institution, July 29, 2013, unedited transcript, https://www.brookings
.edu/events/the-role-of-the-catholic-church-in-cuba-today, 6.
12. Trujillo Lemes, “La Iglesia católica, la condición política cubana y Palabra
Nueva,” 59.
13. Márquez Hidalgo, “The Role of the Catholic Church in Cuba Today,” 12.
14. Linda Qiu, “Are There Political Prisoners in Cuba?” PolitiFact Global News
Service, March 22, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/
mar/22/raul-castro/are-there-political-prisoners-cuba.
15. “Cuba y su Diáspora: Partes Inseparables de una Misma Nacíon,” Espacio La-
ical, no. 28 (October–December 2011), http://www.espaciolaical.org/contens/28/3247
.pdf; “Propuestas para una refundación de las prensa cubana,” Espacio Laical, no. 33
(January–March 2013), http://www.espaciolaical.org/contens/33/3651.pdf.
16. Cuba Posible, http://cubaposible.net.
17. Interview with Roberto Veiga González by Philip Brenner, December 16,
2015, Havana.
18. Jon Lee Anderson, “Cuba’s Film Godfather,” New Yorker, April 24, 2013.
19. Ann Marie Stock, “Zooming In: Making and Marketing Films in Twenty-First-
Century Cuba,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 351–53.
20. As quoted in Michael Chanan, Cuban Cinema (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), 3.
21. Anderson, “Cuba’s Film Godfather.”
22. Emily J. Kirk, “Setting the Agenda for Cuban Sexuality: The Role of Cuba’s
Cenesex,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 36, no. 72
(2011); also see Jon Alpert and Saul Landau, producers, Mariela Castro’s March:
Cuba’s LGBT Revolution, released November 28, 2016, HBO, http://www.hbo.com/
documentaries/mariela-castros-march-cubas-lgbt-revolution.
23. Associated Press, “Cuban Transsexual Elected to Office,” Guardian (London),
November 18, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/18/cuban-trans-
sexual-adela-hernandez-elected.
24. International Telecommunication Union, “Country Profile: Cuba,” ICT-EYE, Au-
gust 23, 2016, http://www.itu.int/net4/itu-d/icteye/CountryProfile.aspx?countryID=63.
25. “With No Sign of a Cuban Spring, Change Will Have to Come from within the
Party,” Economist, May 24, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21550422.
26. David Sanger, “US Says It Tried to Build a Social Media Site in Cuba, but
Failed,” New York Times, April 4, 2014.
27. Desmond Butler, Michael Weissenstein, Laura Wides-Munoz, and Andrea Ro-
driguez, “US Co-Opted Cuba’s Hip-Hop Scene to Spark Change,” Associated Press,
December 11, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20141211/lt-secret
-cuban-hip-hop-abridged/?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=world.
28. ONEI, “Proyecciones de la Población Cubana 2015–2050,” tables 10.1 and
10.2, 2013, http://www.one.cu/proyecciones de la poblacion 2015 2050.htm.
29. Sally Kestin and Megan O’Matz, “Cubans Assure US They Are Coming as
Tourists, Then Stay On,” Sun-Sentinel, December 12, 2015, http://www.sun-sentinel
.com/local/broward/fl-cuba-tourist-visas-aid-20151211-story.html.
30. Margaret E. Crahan, “Cuba: Politics and Society,” in US Policy toward Cuba,
ed. Dick Clark, Aspen Institute Congressional Program, First Conference (Washing-
ton, DC: Aspen Institute, 2002), 26.
31. Hope Bastian Martinez, “‘Adjusting to the Adjustment’: Difference, Stratifica-
tion and Social Mobility in Contemporary Havana, Cuba,” Ph.D. diss (Washington,
DC: American University, 2016), 190–91.
32. Bastian Martinez, “‘Adjusting to the Adjustment,’” 217–24.
354 Chapter 26
34. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of
the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), epigraph.
35. Rafael Hernández, “Demografía política e institucionalidad. Apuntes soci-
ológicos sobre las estructuras políticas en Cuba,” Espacio Laical, no. 10 (April–June
2014): 33.
37. Raúl Castro Ruz, “The Revolutionary Cuban People Will Again Rise to the
Occasion,” Speech to the Closing Session of the National Assembly, July 8, 2016,
http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2016-07-13/the-revolutionary-cuban-people-will-again
-rise-to-the-occasion.
38. Sweig, “Fidel’s Final Victory.”
39. Raúl Castro Ruz, “The Development of the National Economy, along with
the Struggle for Peace, and Our Ideological Resolve, Constitute the Party’s Principal
Missions,” April 18, 2016 (Granma International translation), http://en.granma.cu/
cuba/2016-04-18/the-development-of-the-national-economy-along-with-the-struggle
-for-peace-and-our-ideological-resolve-constitute-the-partys-principal-missions.
40. Alzugaray, “Cuban Foreign Policy during the ‘Special Period,’” 51.
Appendix
Chronology of Key Events
CA. 100–1492
The Guanahatabey, Ciboney, and Taino native peoples arrive on the island
from the Yucatan, south Florida, and northern South America, respectively,
between 100 CE and 500 CE. Estimates about the number of native peoples
living in Cuba in 1492 vary between 150,000 and 200,000.
1492–1595
October 12, 1492: Christopher Columbus lands in the Bahamas with an ex-
pedition of three boats.
October 28: Columbus sights Cuba for the first time. In November, he leads
expeditions to the island, convinced it was actually Cipangu (i.e., Japan).
September 1493: Columbus sets off on his second voyage to the New World.
It is marked by recurrent episodes of violence between the Spanish and the
Native population.
January 1511: Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar begins the
conquest and colonization of Cuba, creating seven settlements.
1511: Velázquez estimates that Cuba’s indigenous population is 112,000. By
1519, it was down to 19,000.
ca. 1512–1515: The Spanish begin to bring the first Africans to Cuba to
provide labor for gold extraction, agriculture, village construction, and
domestic service.
1553: The Spanish governor designates Havana, instead of Santiago, as the
capital of Cuba.
1589: Spain builds the Morro Castle fort at the Havana harbor entrance.
355
356 Appendix
1592: Construction of the Zanja Real aqueduct, the first European-style water
supply system in the Americas, is completed.
1595: Havana’s first sugar mill is established.
1600–1800
1608: Silvestre de Balboa writes Espejo de Paciencia (Mirror of Patience),

the foundational piece of Cuban literature. The work realistically repre-
sents Cuban life at the time.
1620: Havana is the Spanish Empire’s fastest growing city
1717: All tobacco production is placed under a government monopoly.
1720s: Tobacco growers carry out several unsuccessful revolts against Span-
ish mercantilism.
1756–1763: The Seven Years’ War in Europe pits a Spanish-French alliance
against England.
August 1762: A British expeditionary fleet lays siege to western Cuba, seizes
Morro Castle, and controls Havana.
June 1763: The Treaty of Paris ends British occupation.
1773: The Real Colegio Seminario de San Carlos y San Ambrosio is estab-
lished in Havana.
1774: The census records that Cuba has a population of 172,620 inhabitants:
96,440 whites, 31,847 free blacks, and 44,333 black slaves.
1791: Haitian sugar and coffee estates are destroyed as 500,000 slaves take
up arms against their owners. Production shifts to Cuba along with 30,000
fleeing French settlers.
1790–1805: Cuban sugar production grows from 14,000 tons to 34,000 tons
as Spain removes mercantile trade restrictions and European countries
boycott Haitian sugar in response to its 1804 declaration of independence.
1800–1898
January 1812: A series of independent slave insurrections erupt throughout

the island, inspired by the Haitian revolution. In April, the Spanish capture
and hang José Antonio Aponte, whom they mistakenly charge with being
the ringleader.
September 23, 1817: Spain and Britain sign the Treaty for the Suppression of
the Slave Trade, intended to prevent their colonial “subjects from engag-
ing in any illicit traffic in slaves.” Despite the treaty, the number of Cuban
slaves swells from 286,942 in 1827 to 436,495 in 1841.
Chronology of Key Events 357
1830: With a harvest of more than 100,000 metric tons, Cuba becomes the
world’s largest producer of sugar. The growth is facilitated by the construc-
tion of new railroad lines.
1840s: Coffee prices fall, causing a shift in production toward sugar.
1853: The first telegraph line is established.
1860: Sugar accounts for 80 percent of Cuba’s exports.
October 10, 1868: With the Grito de Yara (Cry of Yara), Carlos Manuel de
Céspedes del Castillo calls for Cuban independence from Spain, marking
the start of the Ten-Year War. The rebels concede defeat in 1878 with the
Zanjón Pact.
March 15, 1878: Antonio Maceo refuses to accept defeat and leads the Protest
of Baraguá against capitulation.
August 24, 1879: The Cuban general Calixto Garcia starts the Guerra
Chiquita—the Little War—an attempt to continue the liberation war. It
ends after thirteen months.
October 7, 1886: Spain abolishes slavery in Cuba.
April 10, 1892: José Martí, along with other Cuban emigrés in the United
States, founds the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC).
February 24, 1895: With the Grito de Baire (Cry of Baire), the PRC begins
the “Necessary War.”
May 5, 1895: José Martí, Maximo Gómez, and Antonio Maceo meet at Me-
jorana in eastern Cuba to plan war strategy. Martí is elected as supreme
leader of the revolution on nonmilitary matters.
May 19, 1895: Martí is killed at Dos Ríos in eastern Cuba.
September 13–16, 1895: Delegates from Oriente, Camagüey, and Las Villas
meet to organize the Republic of Cuba’s government. They elect Salvador
Cisneros Betancourt as president; Maximo Gómez as general in chief of
the army; and Antonio Maceo as lieutenant general.
December 7, 1896: Maceo is killed at Punta Brava, near Havana.
January 25, 1898: The US battleship Maine arrives in Havana harbor, where
it explodes on February 15.
April 20, 1898: The US Congress adds the Teller Amendment to a war resolu-
tion against Spain.
July 16, 1898: Spain concedes defeat and the US occupation of Cuba begins.
December 10, 1898: Spain and the United States sign the Treaty of Paris.
1899–1933
1899–1902: General Leonard Wood serves as governor-general of Cuba,

improving some of Cuba’s infrastructure, promulgating laws to facilitate
358 Appendix
the domination of Cuba’s economy by US companies, and restricting Afro-

Cubans from participation in politics.
April 25, 1900: The Cuba Company is incorporated in New Jersey for the
purpose of constructing a central railroad line traversing the island.
February 7, 1902: General Wood issues Order Number 34, which makes the
permits granted to the Cuba Company irrevocable.
May 20, 1902: By a vote of 15 to 14, the Cuban Constitutional Convention
accepts the Platt Amendment as part of the new constitution, giving the
United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, limiting Cuba’s sov-
ereign right to conduct foreign policy, and requiring that Cuba lease three
naval coaling stations to the United States.
July 1902: The North American Trust Company of New York, which acted as
the occupying government’s fiscal agent, begins to operate under the name
of Banco Nacional de Cuba.
May 22, 1903: Cuba and the United States sign a commercial treaty of reci-
procity that gives Cuban sugar exported to the United States a 20 percent
tariff preference and similar preferential tariffs for several US products
sent to Cuba.
May 20, 1906: Tomás Estrada Palma is inaugurated as president for a second
term.
August 16, 1906: Rebellion against the government’s corruption breaks out,
spreading to every province by the end of the month.
September 1906: Estrada Palma asks for US intervention to repress the reb-
els. US president Theodore Roosevelt sends Secretary of War William H.
Taft and Assistant Secretary of State Bacon to Cuba as special represen-
tatives. Estrada Palma and his cabinet resign, and Roosevelt names Taft
provisional governor of Cuba.
October 12, 1906: Charles E. Magoon replaces Taft as provisional governor.
Backed by US occupation forces, he remains in power until January 26, 1909.
May–June 1912: US troops return to help suppress demonstrations led by mem-
bers of the Partido Independiente de Color demanding an end to racist laws.
1913: Mario García Menocal, an engineer and wealthy businessman, be-
comes Cuba’s third president. He serves two terms until 1921.
February–March 1917: Demonstrations erupt throughout the country against
the Menocal administration. The US government sells Cuba ten thousand
rifles and two million cartridges and declares its support for Menocal.
March 5, 1917: Menocal requests a suspension of constitutional guarantees.
Three days later, five hundred US marines enter Santiago de Cuba to help
repress the brewing rebellion.
May 1917: Following Cuba’s entry into World War I, the United States sends
more than twenty thousand troops to the island. After the war, Menocal
requests that the troops stay in Cuba, and they remain there until 1923.
November 1, 1920: In an election plagued by numerous charges of fraud,

Menocal’s candidate, Alfredo Zayas, wins the presidency.
1922: Inspired by the 1918 revolt of Argentine university students, Cuban stu-
dents led by Julio Antonio Mella, secretary of the Federation of University
Students, begin demonstrations, demanding autonomy for the university
from political pressure and the firing of corrupt teachers.
1924: Gerardo Machado is elected president.
August 1925: Groups of socialists, anarchists, and communists come together
to found the Cuban Communist Party. Mella is instrumental in linking the
party to the Comintern.
April 1928: Machado relies on a “packed” constitutional convention to
abolish the vice presidency and give himself a new six-year term without
reelection.
June 21, 1930: Congress suspends constitutional guarantees.
March 1933: A revolutionary junta to oppose Machado organizes in Miami.
August 1933: Machado resigns in the midst of a general strike. Carlos M.
Céspedes becomes provisional president.
September 5, 1933: Following the “revolt of the sergeants,” Fulgencio Batista
takes control of the island.
September 10, 1933: Revolutionaries form a new government with Ramón
Grau San Martín as president and Antonio Guiteras as vice president.
Never recognized by the US government, it becomes known as the One
Hundred Days Government.
1934–1958
January 15, 1934: Backed by US ambassador Jefferson Caffery, Batista pres-

sures Grau San Martín to resign and names Carlos Mendieta as president.
January 20, 1934: The United States recognizes the Mendieta government.
May 29, 1934: Cuba and the United States sign a “Treaty on Relations,”
which replaces the 1903 treaty, abrogates the Platt Amendment, and gives
the United States a lease in perpetuity for the Guantánamo Naval Base.
February 1940: The Cuban constituent assembly begins writing a new
constitution, which is approved on July 1. It guarantees free universal
education and health care and establishes an elected president who names
a prime minister.
October 10, 1940: Fulgencio Batista becomes president under Cuba’s new
constitution.
1944: The Cuban Communist Party changes its name to the Popular Socialist
Party (PSP).
1944: Voters elect Grau San Martín as president.
360 Appendix
December 22, 1946: Heads of several US organized crime syndicates con-

vene in Havana and divide up their opportunities in Cuba for gambling,
money laundering, and related businesses.
1948: Voters elect Carlos Prío Socarrás as president.
March 10, 1952: Fulgencio Batista overthrows the government of Carlos Prio
Socarrás.
July 26, 1953: Led by Fidel Castro, 134 rebels (including Raúl Castro) attack
the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, marking the start of the insurrection
against Batista. Most were killed or captured.
October 16, 1953: At his trial, Fidel asserts, “Condemn me, it does not mat-
ter. History will absolve me.” He and his brother Raúl are imprisoned on
the Isle of Pines.
May 6, 1955: Batista issues a general amnesty. Fidel and Raúl travel to
Mexico after their release, where they meet Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an
Argentine doctor, and plan for a guerrilla campaign in Cuba to overthrow
the Batista dictatorship.
December 2, 1956: Eighty-two rebels return to Cuba aboard the Granma, a
small cabin cruiser, landing in the eastern province of Oriente.
July 20, 1958: Representatives of all the anti-Batista groups sign an agree-
ment—the Pact of Caracas—endorsing a common program and naming
Fidel Castro as the commander in chief of the new united rebel army.
1959
January 1–2: Batista flees and the Rebel Army troops enter Havana led by
Che Guevara.
January 8: Following a cross-country march called the “caravan of liberty,”
Fidel Castro arrives in Havana.
February 16: President Manuel Urrutia names Fidel to replace José Miró
Cardona as prime minister.
April 15–26: Castro travels to the United States at the invitation of the Associa-
tion of Newspaper Editors and meets with Vice President Richard Nixon.
April 21: The Cuban government abolishes racially discriminatory laws.
May 17: The government promulgates the first Agrarian Reform Law, nation-
alizing about one-third of the arable land in Cuba.
1960
February 4–13: Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan visits Cuba and signs
trade and aid agreements.
March 17: President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorizes a plan for the Bay of
Pigs invasion.
May 8: Cuba and the Soviet Union establish diplomatic relations.
June 7: At the urging of the US State Department, US oil companies refuse
to refine Soviet crude oil at their Cuban facilities. Cuba nationalizes the
refineries.
July 6: The United States suspends the Cuban sugar quota, effectively cutting
off 80 percent of Cuba’s exports to the United States.
July 10: The Soviet Union agrees to buy Cuban sugar.
August 6: In retaliation for the US suspension of the sugar quota, Cuba na-
tionalizes US private investments on the island worth approximately $1
billion.
August 29: Fidel announces the plan for the National Literacy Campaign. The
effort formally begins on June 1, 1961.
October 14: The government approves the Urban Reform Law, which in-
cludes a limitation on rental payments to 10 percent of family’s earnings.
1961
January 3: The United States breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba.

April 16: At the funeral for victims of US bombing attacks on April 15, Castro
declares that the character of the Cuban Revolution is socialist.
April 17–19: A CIA-sponsored invasion force of 1,200 exiles lands at the Bay
of Pigs (Playa Girón and Playa Larga). Cuban armed forces and militia
defeat the invaders in 72 hours.
September 2: Cuba is the only Latin American state represented at the found-
ing conference of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations.
November 30: President John F. Kennedy authorizes Operation Mongoose, a
covert plan to overthrow the Cuban government with terrorist raids, eco-
nomic sanctions, political isolation, and military intimidation.
December 22: At the conclusion of the Literacy Campaign, the country’s il-
literacy rate drops from 24 to 4 percent.
1962
January 22–31: The Organization of American States (OAS) suspends Cuba’s

membership.
February 4: Castro responds to the OAS suspension with the Second Declara-
tion of Havana.
362 Appendix
February 3: Kennedy signs Executive Order 3447, beginning the formal em-
bargo against Cuba.
March: Fidel removes his opponents in the Integrated Revolutionary Organiza-
tions who had been senior officials in the PSP (former Communist Party).
April: Cuba accepts a Soviet offer to place ballistic missiles on Cuban terri-
tory. Delivery of the missiles, related equipment, and 42,000 Soviet mili-
tary personnel begins in July.
October 14–November 20: The October (Cuban Missile) Crisis brings the
world to the brink of nuclear destruction as the United States challenges
the Soviet Union to remove the ballistic missiles from Cuba and take back
IL-28 bombers and Komar patrol boats it had delivered.
1963
April 27–June 3: Castro visits the Soviet Union and returns with a new trade
agreement and the promise of aid.
June: Kennedy authorizes support for “autonomous” groups that seek to con-
tinue terrorist raids against Cuba.
1964
July 26: The OAS adopts resolutions requiring all members to sever diplo-
matic and trade relations with Cuba. Only Mexico refuses to comply.
1965
April 1: Che Guevara leaves Cuba to wage armed struggle in Africa and Latin
America.
October 3: The Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) is inaugurated.
October 10: The Camarioca boatlift and airlift begin as boats from the United
States are permitted to pick up Cubans wanting to leave the country at the
port of Camarioca, east of Havana near the city of Matanzas.
1966
January 3–15: The first Tricontinental Congress of the world’s radical organi-
zations meets in Havana and forms the Organization of Solidarity with the
Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Organization of Latin
American Solidarity (OLAS).
November 2: US Congress passes the Cuban Adjustment Act (Public Law

89-732), which provides Cubans who have been on US territory for at
least one year and a day with resident alien status, regardless of whether
they entered the country legally or illegally. The United States gives this
privilege to no other migrant group.
1967
June 26: Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin begins a visit to Cuba, during which
he has tense meetings with Cuba’s leaders over the issue of supporting
third world armed struggle.
July 31–August 10: OLAS holds its first conference in Havana, pointedly
without inviting representatives of communist parties.
October 9: US-supported Bolivian rangers execute Che Guevara in Bolivia.
1968
January 2: The Cuban government introduces gasoline rationing due to a

cutback in deliveries from the Soviet Union.
January 28–31: The PCC holds the first meeting of the full Central Commit-
tee, expelling Aníbal Escalante and eight other leaders of the former PSP,
whom Fidel calls a “micro-faction” and charges that they were seeking to
take over the PCC.
March 13: Castro launches the “revolutionary offensive,” nationalizing
55,000 small businesses and essentially ending private enterprise on the
island.
August 23: Castro asserts that the August 21 Warsaw Pact invasion of
Czechoslovakia was an illegal action but a “bitter necessity” because it
“saved” socialism in Czechoslovakia.
1969
July 26: The effort to produce ten million tons of sugar for the 1970 harvest
begins.
1970
May 19: Castro announces the harvest failed to reach the 10-million-ton goal,
though the 8.5 million tons harvested was the largest in Cuban history.
364 Appendix
September 25: The Soviet Union halts construction of a nuclear submarine

base in Cienfuegos, complying with a US demand.
November 12: Cuba and Chile restore diplomatic relations eight days after
Salvador Allende is inaugurated as Chile’s president.
1971
November 10: Castro arrives in Chile for a three-week visit, his first to a
Latin American country since 1959.
1972
July 11: Cuba joins the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the
trading bloc then composed of the Soviet Union, East European socialist
countries, and Mongolia.
1973
February 15: The United States and Cuba sign an anti-hijacking agreement.
1974
June 30: Matanzas Province holds elections for the newly established “Or-
gans of People’s Power.” This was followed by the nationwide establish-
ment of local and provincial elected legislatures.
September: US senators Claiborne Pell (D-RI) and Jacob Javits (R-NY) are
the first US elected officials to visit Cuba since the 1961 break in diplo-
matic relations.
November: US and Cuban officials secretly meet in New York to discuss pos-
sible areas for negotiations between the two countries.
1975
February 14: The Council of Ministers enacts the Family Code, a set of laws
that provide significant protection for women and children.
July 29: A majority of OAS members, including the United States, vote to lift
mandatory diplomatic and economic sanctions against Cuba.
August 15: Cuba introduces a resolution to the UN Special Committee on

Decolonization calling for the United Nations to recognize the Puerto Ri-
can Independence Party and affiliated organizations as “representing the
legitimate aspirations of the Puerto Rican people.”
August 21: The US Treasury Department announces it will permit third coun-
try subsidiaries of US companies to trade with Cuba.
November 5: Cuba begins transporting troops to help the Angolan govern-
ment repel an invasion by South African forces launched in October. By
the end of 1976, there are 35,000 Cuban troops in Angola.
December 17–22: Ten years after the PCC was created, it holds its First
Congress.
1976
February 15: Cubans vote to approve a new constitution, which institutional-

izes the PCC as “the superior force in society.”
October 6: A bomb aboard a Cubana Airlines plane explodes, killing all
seventy-three people aboard, including the two dozen members of Cuba’s
Olympic fencing team. Venezuelan police arrest Luis Posada Carriles, a
Cuban exile and former CIA employee, for masterminding the terrorist act.
1977
March: President Jimmy Carter lifts the ban on travel to Cuba by US citizens.
March: Fidel Castro unsuccessfully attempts to mediate the conflict between
Ethiopia and Somalia over disputed territory in the Ogaden Desert.
April 27: The United States and Cuba sign an accord on fishing rights.
September 1: The United States and Cuba begin to use their own diplomats
to staff the sections of the Swiss embassy in Havana and Czech embassy in
Washington that represent their respective interests. The diplomats reopen
and work from the former embassy buildings.
December: Nearly 20,000 Cuban combat troops begin to arrive in Ethiopia to
support the government in its conflict with Somalia.
1978
May 25: President Carter mistakenly charges that Cuban troops in Angola
were involved in training Katangese rebels who have invaded Zaire’s
Shaba Province.
366 Appendix
October 21: Cuba releases forty-six prisoners in response to negotiations by

the Committee of 75, a group of Cuban-Americans seeking to improve
relations between Cuba and the United States.
1979
January 1: Cuba permits Cuban-Americans to visit their families. More than

100,000 go to Cuba in the following twelve months.
April 14: The new government of Grenada establishes diplomatic relations
with Cuba and begins to develop economic and political ties.
July 26: Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, attends the annual celebration
commemorating the 1953 Moncada attack, which is dedicated to the July
19 triumph of the Nicaragua Revolution.
August 30: The United States charges that the Soviet Union has installed a
combat brigade in Cuba. Cuba and the Soviet Union assert that the brigade
is a training group that had been stationed in Cuba since 1962.
September 3–9: The sixth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement meets in
Havana.
October 1: Carter announces the establishment of a US military headquarters
in Key West, Florida, and expanded military maneuvers in the Caribbean,
in response to the alleged presence of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba.
1980
March 12: Cubans begin work on a new international airport in Grenada,

which becomes an object of concern for the United States.
March: Private farmers’ markets open, where individual producers or coop-
eratives are able to sell any excess over their contracted production level.
April 21: Cuba announces that anyone wishing to leave the country can be
picked up at the port of Mariel. By September 26, when the port is closed,
125,000 had left the country.
1981
January 20: The government creates the Territorial Troop Militia, composed
of people who are in neither the regular or reserve forces. By 1985, it will
have 1.5 million members.
February 18: US secretary of state Alexander Haig asserts that the United
States has “to deal with the immediate source of the problem [in El Salva-
dor], and that is Cuba.”
October 31: Cuba mobilizes its reserves and goes on full alert as the US Navy
begins four weeks of exercises in the Caribbean.
1982
April 19: The US Treasury Department announces the reimposition of restric-

tions on travel to Cuba.
1983
October 25: The United States invades Grenada, captures 642 Cubans, kills
24, wounds 57, and establishes a provisional government. Of the 784 Cu-
bans on the island, 636 had been construction workers.
1984
June 29: Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson leaves Cuba after a series of
meetings that result in the release of twenty-six prisoners, further openings
for the church in Cuba, and Cuba’s assent to open talks on immigration
issues with the United States.
December 14: The United States and Cuba reached an immigration agreement
under which Cuba would repatriate 2,746 Mariel “excludables” and the
United States would permit the immigration of up to 20,000 Cubans annually.
1985
January: The government creates an Office of Religious Affairs to improve

church-state relations.
March 11: The Soviet Union’s Communist Party elects Mikhail Gorbachev
as general secretary.
May 20: The United States initiates propaganda broadcasts to Cuba over
Radio Martí. In response, Cuba suspends the five-month-old immigration
agreement.
368 Appendix
1986
February 4: The Cuban Communist Party’s Third Congress approves Fidel’s

proposal to begin the “process of the rectification of errors and negative
tendencies.”
February 25: Gorbachev proposes limited free-market operations under his
plan for “perestroika” (restructuring).
May: The Cuban government closes the private farmers’ markets.
1988
March 23: Angolan and Cuban troops secure a major victory against South
African forces in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.
May 3: The United States, South Africa, Angola, and Cuba begin negotiations
to end the Angola civil war.
November 15: The four-party talks conclude in Geneva, Switzerland, with
South Africa’s acquiescence to the independence of Namibia and an agree-
ment that Cuba and South Africa would withdraw their troops from Angola.
1989
July 13: Division General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez and Colonel Antonio
(Tony) de la Guardia y Font are executed following convictions on drug-
trafficking and corruption charges. Interior Minister General José Abrantes
is arrested for corruption and receives a thirty-year prison term.
1990
January 28: Castro declares the onset of a “special period in a time of peace.”
July 25: Gorbachev announces that beginning on January 1, 1991, trade
among members of the CMEA will be on the basis of hard currency ex-
changes instead of barter arrangements.
1991
March 31: The six remaining countries of the Warsaw Pact formally dissolve
their alliance.
June 28: The CMEA formally disbands. More than 85 percent of Cuban trade
had been within the CMEA.
September 11: Without informing Cuba, Gorbachev announces he is with-
drawing all Soviet troops from Cuba and cutting off military aid.
October 10–14: The Cuban Communist Party’s Fourth Congress permits reli-
gious believers to join the Communist Party.
December 25: The Soviet Union dissolves, leaving the Russian Republic as
the successor state.
1992
July 10–12: The National Assembly of People’s Power approves constitutional

amendments that protect foreign investment in Cuba, permit foreign owner-
ship of Cuban property, and impose new environmental safety regulations.
October 23: President George H. W. Bush signs the Cuban Democracy Act
into law.
1993
July 26: The Cuban government legalizes the free circulation and use of US
dollars, which creates a dual, peso/dollar economy.
September 9: Decree-Law 141 goes into effect allowing self-employment
(cuentapropistas) in 117 new occupations. By 2005, the government will
issue approximately 150,000 licenses.
December 31: Cuba’s gross domestic product for the year is 30 percent lower
than in 1989. Cuba imported only 1.8 million barrels of oil in 1993, in
contrast to 13 million barrels in 1991. The average caloric intake of the
working population (ages fourteen to sixty-four) falls to 57 percent of the
World Health Organization’s recommended level.
1994
June–August: An average of more than fifty Cubans per day attempt to cross
the Florida Straits in makeshift rafts and small boats.
July 13: A Cuban coast guard vessel sinks a hijacked tugboat with illegal
emigrants aboard, drowning thirty-seven people.
August 5: Between five and ten thousand people stage the largest anti-gov-
ernment demonstration since 1959 on Havana’s waterfront roadway, the
Malecon, demanding the right to emigrate.
370 Appendix
September 9: President Bill Clinton announces that the United States will
grant twenty thousand visas annually to Cubans and send any Cubans
picked up in international waters to Guantánamo Naval Base.
1995
May 2: US and Cuban officials announce the “wet foot–dry foot” immigra-
tion policy: Cuban exiles rescued at sea will be repatriated to Cuba; those
at Guantánamo Naval Base will be admitted into the United States; any
Cuban setting foot on US territory will be considered a political refugee
and be eligible for citizenship under the Cuban Adjustment Act.
September 5: The Cuban government approves new laws allowing foreigners
to own 100 percent of a business and some kinds of real estate.
1996
February 22: Several leaders of an umbrella opposition organization, Con-

cilio Cubano, receive prison sentences or are detained for allegedly using
US government funds to organize a February 24 conference of 130 Cuban
groups seeking to change Cuba’s form of government.
February 24: A Cuban air force plane shoots down two Brothers to the Rescue
planes in international airspace, killing the four pilots.
March 12: Clinton signs into law the “Cuban Liberty and Solidarity Act,”
known as the Helms-Burton Act, codifying prior executive orders on the
embargo. It potentially gives former Cuban property owners the right to
sue foreign corporations in US courts as repayment for their “trafficking”
with stolen property, and mandates that officers of these corporations be
barred from entering the United States.
December 2: The Council of the European Union adopts a “Common Position”
on trade with Cuba intended “to encourage a process of transition to pluralist
democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
1997
April 12: A bomb explodes in Havana’s Hotel Meliá Cohiba. It is the first in
a string of hotel bombings in which several people are wounded and an
Italian tourist is killed. Luis Posada Carriles later admits to planning the
hotel attacks.
October 11: The Fifth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party installs new,
younger members in key leadership posts and reduces the size of the Cen-
tral Committee from 225 to 150 members.
1998
January 21: Pope John Paul II arrives in Havana, marking the first papal visit
to Cuba. During his five-day visit, he conducts several open-air masses,
which involve hundreds of thousands of Cubans, speaks out against the US
embargo, and calls for improved human rights.
September 12: Five Cuban intelligence agents are arrested and charged with
conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States. Known as the
Cuban Five, they had been involved in efforts to monitor terrorist activities
of anti-Cuban groups in South Florida.
October: Cuba inaugurates the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM)
intended for students mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean who
receive full scholarships.
1999
January 5: Clinton issues an executive order allowing any US citizen to send

remittances to Cubans, and authorizing the Treasury Department to issue
group licenses for the purpose of educational, cultural, humanitarian, reli-
gious, journalistic, and athletic exchanges.
March 28: The Baltimore Orioles win a baseball game against Cuba’s all-star
team at Havana’s Estadio Latinoamericano. The Cuban team wins a second
game on May 3 at Baltimore’s Camden Yards.
November 25: Five-year-old Elián González is found at sea after his raft—
which also had carried his mother—capsizes. The Justice Department per-
mits the boy to return to Cuba with his father on June 28, 2000.
2000
October 27: Clinton signs the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement
Act, relaxing some restrictions on the sale of food and medicine to Cuba.
November 17: Panamanian authorities arrest Luis Posada Carriles and three
other men with a carload of C-4 explosives and dynamite near the Univer-
sity of Panama where Fidel Castro was scheduled to speak.
372 Appendix
2001
June 8: The Cuban Five are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage

at the end of a trial in Miami. The leader, Gerardo Hernández, receives a
sentence of two life terms.
November 4: Hurricane Michelle, the worst storm to hit Cuba in fifty years,
causes the evacuation of more than 700,000 people from their homes. It
leads President George W. Bush to relax some restrictions on the sale of
food to Cuba.
2002
January: Prisoners of war from the US-led action in Afghanistan are housed
in US facilities at the Guantánamo Naval Base. Cuba does not protest this
use of the base.
May 10: Oswaldo Payá, head of the Varela Project, delivers to the Cuban
National Assembly a petition signed by 11,000 Cubans calling on the leg-
islature to hold a national referendum on amending the constitution.
May 12: Former president Jimmy Carter arrives in Havana for a five-day
visit, which includes meetings with Fidel Castro and a speech at the Uni-
versity of Havana in which he praises Cuban advances in health and educa-
tion and criticizes Cuba’s lack of political freedom and the US embargo.
June 13: Castro announces that the Cuban government is downsizing the
sugar industry, closing 71 of the country’s 154 sugar mills.
2003
March 18: Cuban police arrest seventy-five people on charges of treason and
accepting financial support from the United States for their activities.
June 5: In response to the March 18 arrests, the European Union announces
that it will reduce high-level government contacts with Cuba, discourage
member states from participating in Cuban events, and encourage member
states to tighten trade sanctions.
2004
May 6: President George W. Bush’s Commission for Assistance to a Free

Cuba releases a report intended to provide strategies “that will help the
Cuban people hasten the dictatorship’s end.”
June 30: The Bush administration imposes new restrictions on US study
abroad programs in Cuba and educational travel and family visits to Cuba.
November 8: US dollars are taken out of circulation in Cuba and replaced by

the Cuban Convertible Currency (CUC).
November 22: On a visit to Cuba, China’s President Hu Jintao signs a con-
tract for 4,000 tons of nickel sinter annually from 2005 to 2009.
December 14: Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Fidel issue a joint
declaration calling for the “Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.” The
leaders also announce that Venezuela will provide oil to Cuba at drastically
reduced prices, and Cuba will send doctors to Venezuela.
2005
August 30–31: The trial of Luis Posada Carriles, on charges of entering the
United States illegally, opens in Texas. The judge declares a mistrial, and
he is retried and acquitted in 2011.
2006
January: The US Interests Section installs a large ticker tape displaying

exhortations for the Cuban people to struggle for their “freedom,” news
headlines, and quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. In response, the Cuban
government erects 150 poles carrying large flags, effectively blocking a
view of the ticker tape.
July 10: President Bush’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba second
report recommends an $80 million fund “to increase support for Cuban
civil society.”
July 31: As a result of major intestinal surgery, Fidel Castro “temporarily”
turns over his responsibilities to six officials. Vice President Raúl Castro
becomes acting president of the Council of State.
September 11–16: Cuba hosts the summit of the 118-nation Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM) for the second time, and becomes the chair of the NAM
for the next three years.
October 31: Cuba reports an economic growth rate in 2005 of 11.8 percent,
based on measures that include estimates of the market value of free social
services in Cuba and medical services exported to Venezuela and Bolivia.
Cuba has deployed more than 30,000 medical personnel to South America.
2007
May 17: Mariela Castro presides over Cuba’s first celebration of International
Day Against Homophobia.
374 Appendix
July 26: Raúl Castro indicates Cuba’s willingness to improve relations with
the United States.
2008
February 24: Cuba’s National Assembly elects Raúl as president and José
Ramón Machado Ventura as first vice president of the Council of State.
March: Raúl lifts restrictions on the purchase of mobile phones and comput-
ers and the ability of Cubans to stay in tourist hotels and rent cars.
July: The government announces it will lease fallow land to private farmers
and reduce restrictions on the free market sales of produce.
August: A new labor law allows greater salary disparities by lifting the salary
ceiling on highly skilled jobs.
August–September: Hurricanes Gustav and Ike leave 200,000 Cubans home-
less and destroy 25,900 metric tons of agricultural crops, including 50
percent of the sugar crop, 90 percent of the tobacco crop, and 80 percent
of the plantain and banana crop.
October: The European Union restores economic aid it curtailed in 2003,
including emergency hurricane recovery aid of more than $2.6 million in
2008 and $38.9 million in 2009.
December: A poll by the Institute for Public Opinion Research at Florida In-
ternational University finds that 55 percent of Cuban-Americans living in
Miami want an end to the US embargo.
2009
March: Cabinet Secretary Carlos Lage and Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez-
Roque, former close aides to Fidel Castro, resign after admitting “errors.”
Their departure, along with eight other officials, is the first major change
in senior government officials since Raúl Castro’s election as president.
April: In advance of the Summit of Americas, US president Barack Obama
asserts that he wants a “fresh start” with Cuba, lifting all restrictions on
family travel and remittances to Cuba for Cuban-Americans.
June: Despite opposition by the United States, the Organization of American
States votes to start a process to restore Cuba’s membership, which the
organization suspended in 1962. Cuba responds that it has no intention to
resume active membership.
August: Raúl Castro announces the creation of an Office of Comptroller Gen-
eral to improve fiscal discipline and fight corruption.
September: Colombian singer and Miami resident Juanes headlines a concert

in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution, drawing hundreds of thousands of
fans. Approval of the concert by both the US and Cuban governments sig-
nals greater receptivity to cultural exchanges.
December: Cuban authorities arrest Alan P. Gross, a USAID subcontractor,
charging him with committing “acts against the integrity or territorial inde-
pendence of the state” by installing sophisticated satellite communications
transmitters, which may have included the capability to prevent detection
of its signals for a radius of 250 miles.
2010
April: In a speech to the Congress of Young Communists, Raúl Castro asserts

that the state payroll may be inflated by as many as one million workers. He
declares, “The Revolution will not leave anyone helpless . . . but this does
not mean that the State will be responsible for providing a job to everyone.”
May: After the intervention of Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, Raúl
Castro agrees to allow the dissident group “Ladies in White,” initially
composed of the wives and mothers of political prisoners, to hold regular
demonstrations.
July: President Castro agrees to free 166 political prisoners, including all of
those still in jail as a result of the 2003 arrest of government critics.
September: The Cuban government announces plans to cut over one million
state sector jobs and relaxes restrictions on self-employment and small
businesses.
November: Raúl Castro’s plans for economic reform on the island are un-
veiled with the distribution of the “Guidelines for the Economic and Social
Policies of the Party and the Revolution,” which outline 291 proposals for
reform. After widespread public discussions, a revised version is approved
at the 2011 Communist Party Congress.
2011
January: US president Barack Obama relaxes restrictions on travel to Cuba

for academic, religious, cultural, and educational purposes.
April: The Communist Party of Cuba holds its Sixth Congress, the first in
fourteen years, and approves the “Guidelines for the Economic and Social
Policies of the Party and the Revolution.” The party also endorses term
limits for all party and government leadership positions.
376 Appendix
August: The National Assembly approves several economic reforms aimed at

decreasing the state’s role in the retail and service sectors, and promoting
private small businesses and cooperatives.
September–November: The Cuba government allows individuals to buy and
sell houses and automobiles directly to one another for the first time in
fifty years.
December: Ahead of a visit by Pope Benedict XVI, authorities release 2,500
prisoners, including some convicted of political crimes.
2012
January: The Communist Party of Cuba holds its first National Conference, a
meeting intended to complete work left unfinished at the end of the Sixth
Congress.
March 26: Pope Benedict XVI visits Cuba, where he calls for greater reli-
gious and political freedoms and meets with both Fidel and Raúl Castro.
The pope condemns the US embargo against Cuba.
April: The sixth Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, ends with-
out a final communiqué. Speaking on behalf of the Latin American heads
of state, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos declares that there will
not be a seventh summit unless Cuba is invited.
November: The Scarabeo 9 deepwater oil-drilling rig is removed from Cuban
waters. Intended to probe for oil deposits as far down as seven miles, the
rig’s departure places on hold Cuba’s hopes of tapping an estimated 20 bil-
lion barrels of crude oil reserves.
November 19: The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) begin negotiations in Havana to end a fifty-
year civil war.
2013
January: Raúl Castro assumes the presidency of the Community of Latin

American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
January: The Cuban government eliminates the “tarjeta blanca,” an exit per-
mit required any time a Cuban wished to travel outside the island.
February: Cuba’s National Assembly reelects Raúl Castro as president of the
Council of State. He declares that the five-year term as president will be his
last, and he endorses the election of fifty-one-year-old Miguel Díaz-Canel
Bermúdez as first vice president.
February: Leonardo Padura receives the National Prize for Literature. A

popular Cuban novelist, his works go to the edge of acceptable criticism in
highlighting corruption.
March: President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela dies after a long battle with
cancer. His successor Nicolás Maduro pledges to maintain Venezuelan ties
to Cuba.
June: The Cuban government opens 118 Internet cafes across the island,
promising more in the future.
July: The United States agrees to resume immigration talks with Cuba, frozen
for two years because of the imprisonment of Alan Gross.
July: Panama detains a North Korean freighter illegally carrying hidden Cu-
ban military equipment through the Panama Canal.
2014
January 28–29: The Second Summit of the Community of Latin American

and Caribbean States takes place in Havana.
March 29: Cuba’s National Assembly approves a new Foreign Investment
Law as part of the economic reforms to attract hard currency to the country.
May: The Council of Ministers of Cuba approves the general bases for the
drawing up of a Social and Economic Development Program for the period
of 2016–2030.
October: Cuba sends a medical brigade of 165 people—the largest foreign
medical team from a single country—to Sierra Leone to fight the Ebola
epidemic.
December 17: Raúl Castro and Barack Obama announce that their two coun-
tries will reestablish diplomatic relations. Cuba releases Alan Gross on hu-
manitarian grounds and releases a jailed US spy in exchange for the three
remaining members of the Cuban Five still in prison.
2015
January: The Cuban government commutes the sentences of fifty-three peo-

ple whom the United States had identified as political prisoners.
April 9–11: Cuba participates for the first time in the Summit of the Ameri-
cas, held in Panama. Castro and Obama have a private bilateral meeting
for the first time.
May: The US State Department removes Cuba from its list of state sponsors
of terrorism.
378 Appendix
July 20: The Cuban Embassy officially reopens in Washington, DC, with
Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez in attendance. The US Embassy
officially reopens in Havana with the presence of Secretary of State John
Kerry on August 14.
July: The Cuban government begins to expand broadband Wi-Fi access
throughout the country by creating “hotspots” at which users can connect
for a charge of $2 per hour.
September 11: The United States and Cuba hold the inaugural session of the
bilateral commission created to organize and provide continuity to the pro-
cess of normalizing relations.
September 20–22: Pope Francis visits Cuba, during which time he officiates
at three public masses.
2016
March 20–22: President Obama visits Cuba with a bipartisan congressional

delegation. Raúl Castro and Obama hold official meetings, give a joint
press conference, and attend a baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays
and the Cuban national team.
March 25: The Rolling Stones perform at a free outdoor concert in Havana.
April 16–19: At the Cuban Communist Party’s Seventh Congress, delegates
approve resolutions affirming Cuba’s socialist economic model and the
proposed vision for the 2030 National Economic Development Plan, and
elect Raúl Castro as first secretary for a five-year term.
July 4–8: Raúl reports to the National Assembly that Cuba’s gross domestic
product grew by only 1 percent in the previous year, half of what was
planned.
August 24: The Colombian government and FARC sign a peace agreement in
Cuba. After Colombian voters reject the accord in a referendum on October
2, the parties renegotiate its terms in Havana. The Colombian Congress ap-
proves the final agreement on November 30.
October 14: Obama issues PPD-43—which consolidates changed regula-
tions with regard to Cuba—and executive orders that authorize, among
other things, transactions related to Cuban-origin products, the sale of
Cuban pharmaceuticals, joint medical research, and civil aviation safety-
related services.
October 26: For the first time, the United States and Israel abstain in voting
on a UN resolution that calls for the lifting of the US embargo. The final
vote is 191-0-2, in favor of the resolution.
November 25: Fidel Castro dies at the age of ninety in Havana. Cuba declares
nine days of mourning, a period that culminates in his burial on December
4 at Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.
December 12: Cuba and the European Union (EU) sign a Political Dialogue
and Cooperation Agreement, which provides a framework for a rela-
tionship based on equality, reciprocity, and mutual respect. The signing
comes in the wake of the EU’s revocation of its 1996 Common Position
restricting trade.
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Index
A ALBA. See Bolivarian Alternative for

Abourezk, James, 190, 267 the Peoples of Our America
Abrantes, José, 221, 368 Alexseev, Alexander, 147
Adams, John Quincy, 34, 289 Algeria, 161, 192
Africa, 161, 233, 284–285, 293, 324, Allen, Richard, 213
333, 350 Allende, Salvador, 196, 364
Africa-Pacific-Caribbean Cotonou Alliance for Progress, 114
Agreement, 283 Allison, Graham, 144
Cuban internationalism and, 218– Almeida, Juan, 73
221 Alpha 66, 104, 254
Cuban military involvement in, 99, Alzugaray Treto, Carlos, viii, 144, 228,
192–195, 203, 205, 362, 365 351
and slavery, 13, 15, 17–19, 23, 355 American Association for World Health,
See also South African Defense 228
Force; South West African American Federation of Labor, 33
Peoples Organization American Molasses Company, 51
African National Congress, 193 ANAP. See National Association of
Afro-Cubans, 90, 100, 115, 205, 231, Small Farmers
250, 358 Anderson, Jon Lee, 342
Agramonte, Ignacio, 25 Anderson, Rudolph, 142
agrarian reform, 105, 107–108, 114– Angelos, Peter, 267
115, 130, 237, 360 Angola, 188, 190–193, 195, 203, 219–
agriculture, 15, 270, 308, 355 220, 284, 365
agribusiness, 33, 317 Cuito Cuanavale, 216, 285, 368
agroecology, 238, 312 National Front for the Liberation of
sustainable, 238 Angola (FNLA), 193
Airbnb, 310 National Union for the Total
Alarcón de Quesada, Ricardo, viii, 73, Independence of Angola
255 (UNITA), 193, 216, 285
414
Index 415
People’s Movement for the bandidos, 106, 208

Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Barberia, Lorena, 244
190, 192–193, 219 Barrio Adentro Deportivo (Sports in the
anti-imperialism, 53, 132 Neighborhood), 286
apartheid, 193, 217, 284–285 baseball, 43, 267, 371, 378
Aponte, José Antonio, 19–20, 356 Basic Units of Cooperative Production,
Arab Spring, 344 237
Arafat, Yasser, 197 Basulto, José, 255, 256–257
Aragonés, Emilio, 125, 150 Batista, Fulgencio, vi, 52–53, 56, 59,
Arbenz, Jacobo, 70, 88, 131 61–62, 63–64, 68–69, 70, 72–73,
architecture, 87, 315 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 85, 90, 289,
Argentina, 21, 49, 99, 176, 196, 278, 359–360
284, 296, 325 Battle of Ideas, 275
Armstrong, Scott, 220, 267 Bayamo, 6, 8, 19, 26, 242
army. See Revolutionary Armed Forces Bayamo Barracks, 69
Arteaga y Betancourt, Cardinal Manuel, Bay of Pigs, 103, 105, 107, 128–139,
69 145, 147, 153, 157, 158, 188, 213,
Artime Buesa, Manuel, 107 255, 256, 350, 361
artists, 201, 235, 332, 340 Beatles, 165
government repression of, 102, 185 Benes, Bernardo, 203
role within the Revolution, 100 Bengelsdorf, Carollee, 182
See also Cuban Institute of Berger, Sandy, 268
Cinematographic Art and Berle, Adolf A., 137
Industry; Havana Biennial; protest Berlusconi, Silvio, 283
music Betancourt, Ana, 25
Ashcroft, John, 270 biotechnology, 280, 337
Asia, 3, 4, 7, 33–34, 36, 161, 287, 293, Biran, Holguín, 85, 298
318, 350, 362 Bishop, Maurice, 196, 212
Association of Veterans of the Cuban Bissell, Richard, 132
Revolution, 297 black market, 196, 205, 210, 229, 230,
Attwood, William, 158 237, 276
Auténtico Party, 59–60 blockade. See embargo
Autonomist Party, 30 blogs, 341
Azicri, Max, 284 Bolaños, Jorge, viii
Aznar, José María, 283 Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of
Our America/Bolivarian Alliance
B for the Peoples of Our America
B-26 bombers, 135 (ALBA), 286, 287, 289, 333, 325
Bacardí Ltd., 258 Bolívar, Simón, 21
Bachelet, Michelle, 284 Bolivia, 99, 129, 157, 162, 174, 284,
Bain, Mervyn, 76 287, 363, 373
Baker, James, 233 Bolshevik Revolution, 150
Balboa, Silvestre de, 356 Bolton, John R., 280
ballet, 96 Borges, Jorge Luis, 101
Balseros Crisis. See rafters crisis Bosch, Orlando, 259
416 Index
Brazil, 65, 284, 296, 325 attempts to assassinate, 64, 133, 260,
and economic cooperation with 266, 371
Cuba, 236, 305, 318 Bay of Pigs and, 128,137, 138
Brezhnev, Leonid, 164, 192, 217 biography of, 85–86
Brezhnev Doctrine, 164 Catholic Church and, 103, 264, 265,
Brigade 2506, 135–137 340, 376
Brooke, John, 38 corruption, 121, 220, 221, 225, 230,
Brothers to the Rescue, 255–256, 257, 275
260, 370 culture, 103, 185, 341, 342
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 194–195, 203 death, 348–351, 379
Buena Vista Social Club, 231 discrimination, 89, 249, 250
Bundy, McGeorge, 158 education, 116, 119, 180, 361
Burton, Dan, 254 emigration, 245
health care, 181
C July 26th Movement and, 68, 69, 70,
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 101, 103 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 82, 98, 99,
Caffery, Jefferson, 359 102, 122, 360
Camagüey, 6, 8, 24, 105–106, 120, 173, Missile Crisis and, 135, 142, 146,
204, 357 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153
Camarioca, 245, 362 Cuban Revolution and, 81, 87, 97,
Camp Columbia, 52, 69, 77 100, 288, 289
Canada, 28, 176, 232, 236, 273, 325 succession of, 293, 294, 296, 297,
Canary Islands, 13 298, 299, 300, 373
capitalism, 211, 265, 280 Soviet Union and, 131, 159, 161,
Caribbean Contingency Joint Task 162, 163, 164, 165, 217
Force, 198 United States and, 86, 77, 107, 129–
Caribbean crisis. See Missile Crisis 130, 190, 194, 197, 203, 218, 235,
Caribbean islands, 9, 232 254, 256, 257, 259, 331, 372
Caritas, 267 Venezuela and, 286, 333, 373
Carter, Jimmy, 193, 280, 365, 372 Castro Ruz, Ramón, 45, 173
Casa de las Américas, 201, 332 Castro Ruz, Raúl, vii, viii, 45, 76, 86,
Casas, Bartolomé de las, 2, 5, 7, 9 90, 91, 99, 108, 121, 122, 162,
Cason, James, 280 219, 250, 342
cassava root, 6 biography of, 298
Castillo de la Real Fuerza, 15 corruption, 163, 344
Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Catholic Church and, 87, 103–104,
Morro, 15 107, 244, 246, 264–265, 338,
Castro, Ángel, 45, 85, 298 340–341, 367
Castro Espín, Mariela, 250, 336, 342, education, 180
343 governance by, 293, 294, 296, 297,
Castro Ruz, Fidel, vii, viii, 45, 50, 54, 298, 299, 300, 302, 305, 324, 329,
62, 77, 83, 84, 90, 105, 106, 108, 336, 338, 339, 340, 348, 351, 375,
114, 125, 126, 157, 173, 174, 175, 376
177, 181, 198, 210, 218, 219, 250, military and, 105, 106, 134, 280
274, 283, 284, 302, 324, 325, 333, Revolutionary Struggle, 68, 69, 70,
362, 363, 365, 368, 374 71, 73, 360
Index 417
socioeconomic changes, 307, 308, cinema, 341, 342

314, 315, 347 Cuban Institute of Cinematographic
Soviet Union and, 82, 153, 163, 217 Art and Industry, 96, 341
succession, 288, 289, 373 Death of a Bureaucrat, 115
United States and, 254, 295, 328, Guantanamera, 341
329, 330, 333, 374, 377, 378 Habanastation, 341
Castro, Soraya, viii, 253, 254 Lucia, 91
Catholic Church, 87, 103–104, 107, Melaza, 272, 341
244, 246, 264–265, 338, 340–341, Revolución, 341
367, 376 Strawberry and Chocolate, 342
See also Cardinal Manuel Arteaga circunscripciones, 183
y Betancourt, Cardinal Jaime Cisneros Betancourt, Salvador, 357
Ortega y Alamino, Fidel Castro Civil Code, 184
Ruz, Raúl Castro Ruz, Operation Clay, Henry, 24
Peter Pan, John Walsh Clinton, William (Bill), 233, 253, 258,
CDR. See Committees for the Defense 263, 265, 266, 267, 269, 273, 328,
of the Revolution 370, 371
Center for Democracy in the Americas, Clinton administration, 235, 253,
184 255, 257, 260, 268, 282
Central Committee. See Communist Cold War, 76, 149, 188, 193, 198, 217,
Party of Cuba 233, 326, 331
centrales, 27, 48 Colombia, 21, 86, 221, 326, 376, 378
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 64, Colón Cemetery, 137
131, 143, 144, 191, 256 Columbus, Christopher, 2, 7, 14, 355
Central Planning Board (JUCEPLAN), Comandos Rurales, or Rural
122, 209 Commandos, 107
Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de, 24, 357 Comintern, 76, 359
Céspedes y Quesada, Carlos Manuel Commission for Assistance to a Free
de, 52 Cuba (CAFC), 281
Chávez Frias, Hugo, 284, 286, 373, 377 Commission on United States-Latin
Chernenko, Konstantin, 218 American Relations, 189, 193
Chibás, Eduardo, 50, 61, 73, 85 Committee of 75, 203, 366
child care. See education Committee on Santa Fe, 213
Chile, 188, 196, 220, 284, 364 Committees for the Defense of the
China, 4, 34, 189, 193, 267 Revolution (CDR), 123–125, 183,
economic model, 278 245
relations with Cuba, 161, 175, 227, Communist Party of Cuba, 86, 125, 126,
236, 273, 287, 305, 317, 325, 373 154, 163, 177, 182, 188, 217, 218,
Sino-Soviet relations, 159, 160 220, 227, 250, 264, 288, 295, 297,
Christian Democratic Movement, 107 299, 300, 302, 309, 348, 359, 362,
Christian Liberation Movement, 280 363, 367, 369, 371, 375–376, 378
Church, Frank, 133 Communist Party (pre-1959), 49, 59,
Ciboney, 5, 6, 355 60, 76, 122, 125
Cienfuegos, Camilo, 82, 106 Communist Youth, 125, 183, 210,
cigars, 70, 229, 294 294, 295, 342, 375
418 Index
National Conference, 376 Coubre, 107

Popular Socialist Party, 60, 76, 77, Council of Ministers, 86, 183, 300–302,
82, 105, 122, 125, 163, 298, 359, 315, 364, 377
362, 363 Council of Mutual Economic Assistance
Third Party Congress, 211, 368 (CMEA), 175, 209, 364
Fourth Party Congress, 369 Council of State, 86, 182–183, 300–301,
Fifth Party Congress, 371 373, 374, 376
Sixth Party Congress, 375 counterculture, 165, 185
Seventh Party Congress, 314, 378, counterintelligence, 106
351 counterrevolution, 103, 106–107, 115,
Community of Latin American and 123, 125, 131, 133–134, 149, 163,
Caribbean States (CELAC), 303, 254
325–326, 333, 376 coup d’etat, 157
Concilio Cubano, 260, 370 Cuba (1933), 52, 57
Confederation of Cuban Workers Cuba (1952), 61–62, 64
(CTC), 76, 123, 183 Cuba (1968), 163, 168n28
constituent assembly, 41, 42, 52, 56, 359 Chile (1973), 196
Constitution of Cuba Ethiopia (1974), 195
1878 Mambises Constitution, 26 Guatemala (1954), 70
1901 Constitution, 40, 41, 42, 52, Venezuela (2002), 286
358, 359 Crahan, Margaret, 103, 346, 352n5
1940 Constitution, 56, 59, 61, 72, C-rations, 235, 255
184 criollas, 24, 45
1976 Constitution, 86, 182, 184, 280, Crowder, Enoch H., 49
297, 299, 365 Cuba Cane Sugar Company, 47
1982 Constitutional amendment, 232 Cuba Company 45, 358
1992 Constitutional amendments, Cuban Adjustment Act, 235, 245–246,
264, 369 330, 346, 363, 370
One-Hundred-Day Government’s Cuban American National Foundation
Constitution, 52 (CANF), 213, 233, 247, 254, 258,
Constitution of South Africa, 217 259, 268
Constitution of the United States, 18 Cuban-Americans, 43, 203–205, 213,
cooperatives, 120, 209–210, 237, 311– 229, 266, 268, 327, 366, 374
312, 315, 366, 376 dialogue with, 366
cooperativismo, 50 diaspora, 243–251
Correa, Rafael, 284 political participation, 234, 247–248,
corruption, 121, 220, 275, 294, 296, 254–255, 259, 266, 279, 281, 303,
308, 333, 338, 341, 344, 377 328
government response, 221, 368, 374 Cuban Communist Party. See
pre-revolutionary, 44, 47, 49, 60, 61, Communist Party of Cuba
76, 81, 83, 84, 85, 139, 358 Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, 233, 369
special period, 230–231 Cuban Electric Company, 53
Cortés, Hernán, 7, 13 Cuban Five, 259, 329, 371–372, 377
Costa Rica, 296 Cuban Liberation Army, 38, 41
Index 419
Cuban Liberty and Solidarity Dobrynin, Anatoly, 147

(LIBERTAD) Act. See Helms- doctors, 6, 65, 108, 115, 116, 171, 178,
Burton Act 181, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 249,
Cuban Medical Professional Parole 296, 304, 338, 346
(CMPP), 304 abroad, 196, 286, 288, 319, 332, 339,
Cubana Airlines flight 455, 191, 259 373
Cubanacán, 232 education programs, 120
Cuban National Assembly, 182, 183, Domínguez, Jorge, 61, 218, 251, 254
255, 280, 298–301, 309, 314, 328, Donovan, James, 158
340, 343, 351, 369, 372, 374, 376, Dortícos Torrado, Osvaldo, 105
377, 378 Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 70
Cuban National Union of Writers and dual currency, 229–231, 296, 315, 316
Artists, 103 Dubček, Alexander, 164
Cuba Posible, 341
Cuban Refugee Program, 245 E
Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), 28, Eagleburger, Lawrence, 190, 266
41, 44, 357 Eastern bloc, 175, 226
CUC (convertible peso), 294, 316, 317, Echeverria, José Antonio, 73
373 Eckstein, Susan, 114, 244, 248
cuentapropistas, 230, 274, 311, 369 economy, 47, 65, 75, 84, 87, 97, 121,
149, 164, 171, 202, 203, 211, 233,
D 248, 254, 273, 281, 287, 289, 319
Daniel, Jean, 158 centralized economy, 122, 132
Dávila, Carlos Lage, 302 changes in, 89, 90, 91, 116, 120, 178,
day care. See education 180
de Beauvoir, Simone, 101 dependence on the Soviet Union,
DEFCON-2, 152 166, 175, 176, 198, 226
democracy, 72, 86, 123, 370 dependence on the United States, 47,
in Cuba, 84, 139, 181, 182, 183, 351 48, 49, 50, 59, 60, 358
pre-revolutionary, 70 dual currency economy, 229, 230,
US promotion, 282, 331, 344 231, 369
Democratic Revolutionary Front (Frente economic reforms, 289, 300, 303,
Revolucionario Demnocrático or 307, 308, 314, 340, 341
FRD), 107 sugar (plantation) economy, 15, 16,
Desnoes, Edmundo, 89 17, 24, 26, 27
Détente, 188, 190 See also black market; embargo;
Development Alternatives International, foreign investment
304 education, 112, 185, 206, 219, 226, 230,
Dewey, George, 36 248, 273, 296, 302, 308, 311, 319,
Dewey, John, 180 343, 347, 372
Díaz-Balart, Mirta, 85 day care, 91, 115, 178, 181, 184, 311
Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, Miguel, 300, Escuela Secundaria Basica en el
302, 376 Campo (ESBEC), 179–180, 227
dissidents, 62, 106, 260, 281, 282, 340, pre-revolutionary, 65, 359
375 See also National Literacy Campaign
420 Index
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 77, 361 Federation of Cuban Women (FMC),

Eisenhower, Milton, 111 91, 123, 183–184
Eisner, Peter, 277, 337–338 Federation of Middle School Students
Eliécer Gaitán, Jorge, 86 (FEEM), 183
El Salvador, 191, 196, 212, 214, 215, Federation of University Students (FEU),
217, 218, 233, 267 49, 73, 85, 123, 183, 297, 331, 359
embargo, 151, 154, 160, 176, 189, 190, Feinberg, Richard, 253, 311, 317, 347
191, 194, 196, 220, 227, 233, 257, Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 101
258, 266, 267, 271, 281, 283, 303, Fernández, José Ramón, 137, 249
304, 318, 320, 328, 331, 339, 344, Fernández, Lino, 107
362, 370, 371, 372, 374, 376, 378 Fernández, Pablo Armando, viii, 101,
international response, 265 103, 186, 201–202
origins, 132, 149, 171 First National Congress of Education
socioeconomic impact, 228, 295, 337 and Culture, 185
empathy, vi–vii, 144, 154, 195–196, Fisk, Daniel, 258, 279
219, 331 Florida Straits, 59, 62, 234–235, 246,
enlightenment, 98 255, 268, 328, 369
environment, 237, 238, 369 Flowers, Gennifer, 233
Erisman, Michael, 333 foco theory, 174
Eritrean separatists, 195 food security, 333, 347
Escalante, Aníbal, 125, 163, 363 Ford, Gerald, 190, 227
Escalante Font, Fabián, 106 foreign investment, 27, 45, 60, 62, 230,
Escambray Mountains, 106, 134–135 232, 236, 254, 273, 283, 315, 317,
Escobar, Pablo, 221 319, 369, 377
Espacio Laical, 341 foreign policy of Cuba, viii, 131, 152,
Espejo de Paciencia, 356 154, 158–162, 164, 165, 214, 218,
Espín Guillois, Vilma, 71, 90–91, 298 219, 284, 324–333
Estrada Palma, Tomás, 43, 358 Franco, Adolfo, 279
European Union, 260, 283, 326, 370, Frank, Marc, viii, 275, 295
372, 374, 379 Franqui, Carlos, 101, 103, 338
Evenson, Debra, 182, 184 Free Trade Area of the Americas, 287
Frei Betto, 103, 264, 340
F Freud, Sigmund, 70
Fagen, Patricia Weiss, 26 Friedman, Max Paul, 86
Fagen, Richard 65 Fuentes, Norberto, 220
Family Code, 184
FAR. See Revolutionary Armed Forces G
Farabundo Martí National Liberation García, Calixto, 25, 26, 87, 357
Front (FMLN), 196, 218 García Márquez, Gabriel, 185, 188
farmers’ markets, 209–211, 237, 366, García Menocal, Mario, 358–359
368 García, Néstor, 190
farming, urban and suburban, 237–238, García Castro, Teresa, vii, 263, 301
312–314 gays. See homosexuality
Federal Emergency Management Gibara, 3
Agency, 328 Ginsberg, Allen, 101
Index 421
Gleijeses, Piero, 192 H

Gómez, José Miguel, 47 Haig, Alexander, 212, 367
Gómez, Máximo, 25, 28, 44, 357 Haiti, 4, 16, 19, 23, 24, 74, 304, 356
González, Elián, 263, 268–269, 275, Halperin, Morton, 253
297, 371 hard currency, 92, 93, 121, 162, 176–
González, René, 329 177, 208, 227, 229, 231–232, 237,
González Mederos, Lenier, 341 248, 249, 273, 275, 276, 297, 303,
Goodwin, Richard, 147 308, 315, 316, 317, 319, 377
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 211, 232, 367 See also CUC
Gott, Richard, 44, 74, 106, 174, 221 Harriman, E. H., 45
governor-general, 44, 357 Hart, Armando, 71, 105
Granma Hatuey, 8–9, 352
boat, 71, 98, 99, 360 Havana Biennial, 332
newspaper, 205, 218, 280, 302, 331 Hawkins, Jack, 133
Grau San Martín, Ramón, 50, 82, 85, 359 Hay, John, 37
Grenada, 196, 197, 212, 366, 367 health care, 108, 112, 114, 120, 178,
Grito de Yara (Cry of Yara), 24–25 181, 184, 206, 219, 226–227, 245,
Gross, Alan P., 304, 328–329, 375, 377 248, 273, 275, 285–286, 296, 311,
Grupo de Apoyo, 299, 302 327, 359
Guanahatabey, 5, 355 Helms, Jesse, 254, 281
Guantánamo Bay, 4, 8, 331 Helms-Burton Act, 254, 258, 267, 273,
Naval Base, 44, 134, 280 279, 370
Guardia, Tony de la, 220, 368 Hemingway, Ernest, 220
Guatemala, 70, 71, 88, 99, 131, 133, Heredia, José María, 20–21, 243
136, 288 Hernández, Gerardo, 372
Guerra Chiquita (Little War), 26, 28 Hernández, Melba, 90
Guerra, Lillian, 83 Hernández, Rafael, viii, 84, 348
Guevara, Alfredo, 341, 342 Hevía, Carlos, 61
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 70, 121, 142, Hispaniola, 4–8, 10, 15–16
150, 153, 157, 160, 165, 181, 298, Holguín, 19, 27, 85, 172–174, 298, 302
332 Homestead Act, 33
biography, 99 homosexuality, 184, 342, 343
death, 174, 177, 196, 363 Hoover, Herbert, 51
internationalism, 161, 162, 362 House International Relations
July 26th Movement, 82, 98, 360 Committee, 254
“New Man,” 98, 99, 100, 211 Howard, Lisa, 158
United States, 147, 149 Hugo, Victor, 70
Guidelines for the Economic and Social human rights, 62, 83, 194, 216, 260,
Policies of the Party and the 280, 284, 329, 331, 370–371
Revolution (Lineamientos), 102, Hurricane Dennis, 273
309–311, 314, 333, 339, 375 Hurricane Michelle, 279, 283, 372
Guiteras, Antonio, 53, 359
Gulf of Batabanó, 13 I
Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 115, 341 ICAIC. See cinema
Gutiérrez Menoyo, Eloy, 253–254 IL-28 bombers, 153, 362
422 Index
imperialism, 72, 131, 132, 138, 160, Kibbutzim, 180

161, 165, 185, 211, 285, 350 Kirchner, Néstor, 284
“import-substitution industrialization” Kirk, John, 333
(ISI), 112 Kissinger, Henry, 189, 191, 216, 266
India, 3, 4, 34, 236 Kissinger Commission, 216
indigenous peoples of Cuba, 5–6, 355 Klepak, Hal, 108
See also Ciboney; Guanahatabey; Kleptocracy, 44
Taino Komar patrol boats, 153, 362
Indo-China, 34 Kornbluh, Peter, 214
infant mortality, 9, 111, 225 Kosygin, Alexei, 157, 162, 363
ingenios. See centrales
Integrated Revolutionary Organizations L
(ORI), 125, 362 labor unions, 59, 123
intercontinental ballistic missiles Lage Davila, Carlos,302, 374
(ICBMs), 145–146 Landau, Saul, viii, 84, 165, 267
Interests Section, 194, 330 Lansky, Meyer, 53, 64
Cuban, 302 Las Villas Province, 75, 357
United States, 65, 201, 214, 216, latifundio (plantations), 15–19, 23–26,
280, 302, 373 45, 56, 85, 114, 188, 242
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 236 Lazo Hernández, Esteban, 340
internet, 304, 332, 343–344, 347, 377 Lechuga, Carlos, 272
Isle of Pines, 70, 219, 360 Lemus, José Francisco, 21
Isle of Youth, 219 Levinson, Sandra, 332
Liberal Party, 46–47
J libreta (ration book), 121, 209
Jacobson, Roberta S., 331 Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), 161
Javits, Jacob, 190, 364 Lineamientos. See Guidelines for the
jazz, 101, 332 Economic and Social Policies of
Jefferson, Thomas, 34, 359 the Party and the Revolution
Jewish community, Cuban, 304 Linowitz Commission. See Commission
Jiménez, Marguerite Rose, 120, 231 on United States-Latin American
Jintao, Hu, 305, 373 Relations
Johnson, Lyndon, 85, 158 Literacy Campaign. See National
Jones-Costigan Act, 57 Literacy Campaign
July 26th Movement, 25, 69, 72–77, López Portillo, José, 214
81–82, 84, 90, 101–102, 104–105, Loyola Vega, Oscar, 9
114, 122, 125, 131, 172, 298, 338 Luciano, Charles “Lucky,” 64
Juventud Rebelde, 294 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 284
Lunes de Revolución, 101, 103, 201
K
Kennedy, John F., 85, 97, 114, 132–137, M
143–147, 149–150, 152–154, 158, Maceo, Antonio, 25, 26, 28, 30, 90, 357
171, 361–362 Machado y Morales, Gerardo, 48,
Kennedy, Robert, 147 49–52, 359
Khrushchev, Nikita, 122, 138, 143, 145– Machado Ventura, José Ramón, 300,
148, 150–154, 159–160, 233 374
Index 423
Maduro, Nicolás, 377 wet foot–dry foot policy, 255, 370

Maginot Line, 145 Mikoyan, Anastas, 131, 242, 360
Magoon, Charles, 46–47 Milanés, Pablo, 100, 2476
Maine, USS, 34–36, 357 Military Units to Aid Production
Mambí, El 25 (UMAP), 103
Mandela, Nelson, 284, 285 Ministry of Agriculture, 314
Manley, Michael, 177, 198, 211 Miró Cardona, José, 82, 104–105, 360
Mariel boatlift, 201–206, 208–210, 235, Misión Robinson, 286
245–246, 248, 266–267 Missile Crisis, 142–154, 157, 158, 160–
Mariel Special Development Zone 161, 163, 198, 213, 216, 362
(ZEDM), 317–318 Moncada Barracks, 69, 86, 298, 360
Márquez Hidalgo, Orlando, viii, 340 monoculture, 16, 48, 120
Martí, José, 21, 23, 28–29, 83, 90, 204, Monreal, Pedro, viii, 319
243, 352, 357 Monroe Doctrine, 130, 254
Martínez Campos, Arsenio, 26 Monroe, James, 34
Martinez, Mel, 281 Morales, Esteban, 249
Marx, Karl, 70 Morales, Evo, 284, 287
Marxist-Leninist, 70, 104, 122, 157, Moscoso, Mireya, 259
215, 264 Movement to Recover the Revolution,
Mas Canosa, Jorge, 213, 247, 254, 266 107
Matos, Húber, 105–106
Matthews, Herbert, 72 N
McCarry, Caleb, 282 narcotics, 64
McGovern, George, 190, 267 Narváez, Pánfilo de, 8–9
McKinley, William, 34, 36–37, 41–43 National Assembly, 182–183, 255, 280,
McNamara, Robert S., 85 298–301, 309, 314, 328, 340, 343,
media, 73, 164, 194, 219, 255, 275, 286, 351, 369, 372, 374, 376–378
339, 341, 344 National Association of Small Farmers
Medvedev, Dmitri, 305 (ANAP), 123, 183
Mella, Julio Antonio, 49, 50, 359 National Center of Sexual Education
Mendieta, Carlos, 53, 359 (CENESEX), 342
Menendez, Robert, 266, 328 National Institute for Agrarian Reform
Mesa Redonda, 275 (INRA), 114, 121–122
Mexico, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 37, 52, 61, nationalization, 131, 237, 258
70, 71, 86, 98, 99, 165, 172, 208, National Literacy Campaign, 116–119,
296, 298, 360, 362 178, 297, 361
microbrigade, 178 brigadistas, 116–117, 120
micro-faction, 163–164, 363 National Revolutionary Militia, 106
Middle East, 280, 350 National Security Council, 145, 203,
migration, 23, 59, 215, 235, 330 213, 253, 256, 267, 279, 329
emigration, 115, 166, 202, 245 neocolonialism, 47
immigration, 255, 256 neo-colony, 43
internal migration in Cuba, 172 Neruda, Pablo, 101
negotiations over, 246, 253, 281, Nethercutt, George R., 270
304, 328, 367, 377 New Jewel Movement, 196
424 Index
“New Man.” See Guevara, Ernesto “Che” meeting in Uruguay (1961), 147
New System of Economic Management Summit of the Americas in Colombia
and Planning (SDPE), 209, 211 (2012), 326, 376
Nicaragua, 130, 191, 196, 212, 214, Summit of the Americas in Panama
215, 217, 218, 220, 233, 247, 256, (2015), 329, 333, 377
325, 366 Summit of the Americas (Trinidad
nickel, 213, 236, 273, 287, 305, 311, and Tobago), 303, 332
317, 373 Organization of Latin American
Nixon, Richard, 85, 111, 129–130, 134, Solidarity (OLAS), 362–363
189, 214, 360 Organization of the Solidarity of the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 159, People of Africa, Asia, and Latin
188, 197, 211, 284, 366, 373 America (OSPAAAL), 161
non-governmental organizations Ortega, Daniel, 366
(NGOs), 267, 270 Ortega y Alamino, Cardinal Jaime, 340,
Noriega, Roger, 279, 281 375
normalization, 190, 193 Ortodoxo Party, 50, 61, 68, 73, 85–86,
nueva trova, 100, 276 114
Nuñez Jiménez, Antonio, 114, 122 Oltuski, Enrique, 105
Nye, Joseph, 332
Nyerere, Julius, 193 P
Pact of Caracas, 75–76, 86, 360
O Padilla, Héberto, 103, 185–186
Obama, Barack, 245, 247, 258, 303– Padura, Leonardo, 102, 338, 377
304, 316, 326–332, 344, 374–375, País, Frank, 71, 73–74
377–378 Palabra Nueva, 340–341
Ochoa, Arnaldo, 220–221, 368 paladar, 230, 274, 310, 317, 337
October Crisis. See Missile Crisis Palestinian Liberation Organization,
Odebrecht, 318 197
Office of Foreign Assets Control, US Panama Canal Zone, 46, 317, 377
Treasury Department (OFAC), Pastor, Robert, 194
267 Payá Sardiñas, Oswaldo, 280, 282, 372
Office of National Statistics and Paz, Octavio, 185
Information (ONEI), 345 Pell, Claiborne, 190, 364
Office of Religious Affairs, 264, 367 peninsulares, 24
Ogaden Desert, 195, 365 People’s Militia, 137
Omega 7, 260 perestroika, 211, 368
One-Hundred-Day Government. See Pérez, Faustino, 71, 75, 105
Revolution of 1933 Pérez, Louis A., Jr., vi, 13, 16, 18, 29,
Operación Milagro, 286, 324 65, 86, 96, 100, 129, 243, 347,
Operation Mongoose, 149, 153, 256, 348
361 Pérez Roque, Felipe, 282, 302, 374
Operation Peter Pan, 104, 179, 242, 244 Pérez-Stable, Marifeli, 76, 89
Organization of American States (OAS), Perón, Juan Domingo, 196
132, 149, 189–190, 303, 325, 361, Perú, 21, 188, 196, 205, 208, 325
362, 364, 374 peso cubano (CUP), 316–317
Index 425
pharmaceuticals, 92, 181, 226, 273, 337, Reich, Otto, 279

378 Remírez de Estenoz, Fernando, 302
Philippine Independence War, 36 remittances, 92, 229, 231, 248, 266,
Pinar del Río, 16, 30, 173, 183, 293 267, 273, 316, 317, 327, 328, 345,
Pinta, 3–4 371, 374
Platt, Orville, 41 Reno, Janet, 257
Platt Amendment, 40, 41–42, 43, 44, 46, Republican Wednesday Group, 189
51, 53, 254, 330, 358–359 resolute socialists, 315
Playa Girón. See Bay of Pigs Revolución, 101, 151, 338
Poder Popular (People’s Power), 182– Revolutionary Armed Forces of
183 Colombia (FARC), 326, 376, 378
political prisoners, 70, 103, 203, 204, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba,
253, 265, 283, 329, 341, 375, 377 106, 288, 294, 298
polyclinics, 123, 178, 181, 228 Revolutionary Directorate, 73, 125
Pope Benedict XVI, 376 Revolutionary Offensive (1968), 164–
Pope John Paul II, 264, 265, 340, 371 166, 185, 363
Posada Carriles, Luis, 191, 258, 365, Revolution of 1933, 51–53
370–371, 373 Richardson, Bill, 189, 256
poverty, 65, 66, 82, 111, 120, 172, 178, Rio Group, 303, 325, 326
211, 215, 216, 219, 248, 278, 325, Roa Kouri, Raúl, 50
332, 333, 339 Roca, Blas, 59
Powell, Colin, 281 Rodríguez, Bruno, 378
Prague Spring, 164–165 Rodríguez, Carlos Rafael, 59, 122, 153,
Presidential Directive 52, 198 214
Presidential Directive/NSC-6, 193 Rodríguez, Silvio, 100, 276
Prieto, Abel, 116, 339 Rogers, William D., 189
Prío Socarrás, Carlos, 50, 60, 360 Rogers, William P., 189
prostitution, 14, 64, 231, 232, 276 Roosevelt Corollary, 254
protest music, 276–278 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 51, 53, 57,
Protest of Baraguá, 25–26, 357 59
Puerto Rico, 6, 15, 23, 85, 151, 190, Roosevelt, Theodore, 36, 37, 42, 44–47,
228, 244, 258 129, 358
Root, Elihu, 41
R Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana, 328
race, 19, 24, 25, 26, 40, 56, 89–90, 106– Rough Riders, 37, 42
107, 172, 182, 205, 244, 248–51 rum, 50, 210, 229, 258, 288
Radio Martí, 213, 214, 235, 255, 280, Russia, 242, 305
367
Radio Swan, 213 S
rafter exodus, 234–235 Saladrigas, Carlos, 59
Ramonet, Ignacio, 70, 221 San Carlos Seminary College, 20
Ray, Manuel, 105 Sánchez, Celia, 71, 75, 90
Reagan, Ronald, 196, 197, 212, 213, Sánchez, Jorge Mario, viii, 273, 302,
214, 215, 217, 218, 247 339, 348
Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, 57 Sánchez-Parodi, Ramón, vii, 190
426 Index
Sandinista, 196, 215, 217–218, 233, 366 Soviet Union. 76, 122, 129, 160, 171,
Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, 379 197, 367
Santamaría, Haydee, 71, 90 collapse, 232, 233, 236, 272, 288, 369
santería, 97 Cuba’s role in Africa, 191, 193, 194,
Santiago de Cuba, 8, 13, 14, 69, 77, 195
86–87, 120, 173, 298, 358, 379 invasion of Afghanistan, 198
Santos, Juan Manuel, 326, 376 invasion of Czechoslovakia, 164,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101, 185 165, 166
Scarabeo 9, 376 Missile Crisis, 142, 143, 144, 145,
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 137 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154
Sechin, Igor, 305 relations with Cuba, vi, 62, 104, 106,
Second Declaration of Havana, 150, 126, 130, 131, 159, 161, 162, 163,
160, 361 175, 176, 177, 188, 189, 211, 214,
security-oriented skeptics, 315 217, 218, 226, 286, 287, 349, 361,
Sékou Touré, Ahmed, 193 362, 363, 364
Selassie, Haile, 195 relations with the United States, 152,
self-serving survivalists, 315 215, 366
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Spain, 42, 45, 85, 104, 120, 196, 242,
254 244, 302
Sergeants’ Revolt, 52 colonization, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13,
Seven Years’ War, 16, 356 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 27, 30, 153,
Seward, William Henry, 34 355, 356
Sherritt International, 236, 273 Cuban independence war, 23, 24,
Shops for the Recovery of Hard 25, 26, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
Currency, 229 281, 357
Sierra Maestra, 8, 62, 71, 72, 73, 74, foreign investment, 232, 236, 283,
75, 77 305, 317
Sino-Soviet relations, 159 Special Period, 225–241, 247, 248, 274,
Smith, Earl E. T., 77, 84, 129, 349 276, 282, 288, 294, 296, 298, 299,
Smith, Wayne S., 130, 195, 203, 214 309, 316, 332, 341, 342, 368
socialism sports, 82, 125, 178, 310, 340
Cuban, 159, 182, 211, 231, 296, 308, cooperation, 286, 319
309, 315, 336, 351 Stalin, Joseph, 76, 338
European, 164, 165, 166, 363 Standard Oil, 131
Fidel Castro, 70 sugar, 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 36, 41, 43, 48,
soft power, 219, 332, 333 50, 57, 69, 76, 84, 88, 92, 93, 112,
Solás, Humberto, 91 159, 162, 171, 175, 176, 177, 202,
Soles y Rayos de Bolívar, 20 212, 227, 232, 236, 237, 242, 273,
Somoza, Anastasio, 196 297, 305, 356, 357, 358, 372, 374
South African Defense Force (SADF), sugar beets, 27, 36, 47, 48
216 sugar economy, 15–17, 23, 26–27,
South West African Peoples 47–48, 60, 93, 112, 114, 120, 121,
Organization (SWAPO), 193, 131, 175, 226, 273–274
219–220 sugar quota, 47, 48, 57, 131–132, 361
Index 427
ten-million-ton harvest, 162, 166, Treaty of Paris (1898), 38, 40, 357
174–175, 363 Triana, Juan, 309
Summit of the Americas. See Tricontinental Conference, 161
Organization of American States Trinidad, 8, 128, 134
Sumner Welles, Benjamin, 51 Trotsky, Leon, 338
surface-to-air missile (SAM), 142 Trujillo, Rafael, 85
Sweig, Julia, 74, 289, 333, 351 TV Martí, 214
T U
T-33 jet trainers, 135 U-2 surveillance plane, 142, 146–147
Tabío, Juan Carlos, 341–342 UJC. See Communist Party of Cuba
Taft, William Howard, 46–47, 358 UMAP. See Military Units to Aid
Taino, 3, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 352, 355 Production
Tariff Act of 1890, 214 unemployment, 27, 49, 50, 84, 112, 115,
Tarnoff, Peter, 235, 255 173, 203, 274
Taylor Committee, 136 Unidades Básicas de Producción
Teller Amendment, 36, 41–42, 357 Cooperativa (UBPC). See Basic
Ten-Year War, 24–25, 28, 30, 44, 82, Units of Cooperative Production
357 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Territorial Troop Militias (MTT), (USSR). See Soviet Union
217–218 United Nations, 142, 260, 279, 302, 365
terrorism Committee on Colonialism, 190
9/11 terrorist attacks, 279, 280 Human Rights Council, 284
committed against Cuba, 106, 149, United Party of the Socialist Revolution
259, 260 (PURS), 126
Cuba on the terrorist list, 304, 329, United States Agency for International
377 Development (USAID), 212, 279,
Texaco, 60, 131 281, 304, 328, 344, 375
Thant U., 151, 153 University of Córdoba, 49
third world countries, 219 University of Havana, 49–50, 61–62,
Tlatelolco Treaty, 161 68, 85, 280, 288, 298, 347, 372
Tobacco Trust, 48 University of Holguín, 172
tocororo (trogon), vi University Student Directory (DEU),
Torres, Ricardo, viii, 319 50, 52–53
Torres-Cuevas, Eduardo, 9 Urban Reform Law, 115, 361
Torricelli, Robert, 233, 268 Uriarte, Mirén, 230
Torrijos, Omar, 196 Urrutia Lleó, Manuel, 82, 104–105, 360
tourism, 50, 59, 60, 63–64, 65, 83, 229, USAID. See United States Agency for
231–232, 236, 237, 248, 253, 256, International Development
258–259, 273, 297, 312, 317, 319, US Department of Justice, 203, 259,
374 329, 371
Trade Sanctions Reform and Export US Department of State, 42, 77, 81,
Enhancement Act (TSRA), 271, 104, 129, 158, 193, 194, 195, 196,
279, 283 203, 215, 216, 253, 255, 256, 259,
Trafficante, Santo, Jr., 64 280, 304, 328, 361, 377
428 Index
US Department of Treasury, 283, 365, westward passage, 2

367, 371 wet foot–dry foot policy. See migration
Weyler, Valeriano, 29–30, 34, 36, 72–73
V Whalen, Charles, 190
Valdés, Nelson, 97, 122–123 Wilhelm, Silvia, 242–243, 270
Valdés Menéndez, Ramiro, 302 Wilson, Woodrow, 49
Valenciaga, Carlos, 288 Windward Passage, 4, 8, 19
Varadero Beach, 62, 170 women’s rights, 24, 49, 90–91, 184,
Varela, Carlos, 276, 278 227, 333 364
Varela Project, 280, 372 See also Federation of Cuban
Varela y Morales, Félix, 20 Women
Veiga González, Roberto, 341 Wood, Leonard, 41, 44, 357–358
Velázquez de Cuéllar, Diego, 7–8, 355 Woolf, Virginia, 101
Venezuela, 5, 75, 89, 111, 191, 259 World Bank, 85
Cuba’s relations with, 157, 236, 284, World Health Organization, 227, 369
286, 305, 319, 321, 325, 333, 344, Wyden, Peter, 133
365, 373, 377
Vidal, Pavel, 316 X
Vidal Ferreiro, Josefina, viii, 331 Xaraguá, 7–8
Vietnam, 161, 166, 189, 278, 314
Villaverde, Cirilo, 70 Y
visas, 235, 245, 246, 281, 346, 370 Yoruba, 97
Voice of America, 213 Young, Andrew, 194
Yucatan Peninsula, 5
W
Walsh, John, 104 Z
Warsaw Pact, 150, 164, 363, 368 Zanetti, Oscar, viii, 97
Washington Consensus, 278 Zayas, Alfredo, 47–49, 359
West India Fruit and Steamship Zionism, 197
Company, 62 ZunZuneo, 344

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Cuba Libre

Philip Brenner and Peter Eisner

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Printed in the United States of America

PART I: 1492–1958

PART II: 1959–1989

14 Internal Adjustments and Advancing Equality, 1963–1975 170

PART III: 1990–2016

Appendix: Chronology of Key Events 355

The tocororo, or trogon in English, is Cuba’s national bird. Cubans com-

economic organization, independence and sovereignty remain core goals

Columbus Arrives and Spain

COLUMBUS ENCOUNTERS CUBA

explorations—including portions and a summary of Columbus’s lost journal

represented the culmination of seven years of maneuvering and lobbying with

THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF CUBA

The indigenous groups Columbus encountered in Cuba were of the Taino,

SPAIN ORGANIZES CONTROL SLOWLY

Despite an initial interest in Columbus’s conquests, Spain took its time to

permanent settlement that had been established on Hispaniola, where colonial

THE TAINOS RESIST SPANISH DOMINATION

His criticism provoked clerical and popular condemnation of Spanish colo-

1. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies

19. Pérez, Cuba, 20.

Sugar and Slavery

DECLINE AND RESURGENCE OF

The Origins of the Name “La Habana”

* As quoted in Cluster and Hernández, The History of Havana, 1.

during several sixteenth-century wars. The discovery of the Gulf Stream—

Castillo de la Real Fuerza, was more a symbolic structure than a meaningful

THE EMERGENCE OF THE SUGAR ECONOMY

Cuba Is a Late Bloomer in Producing Sugar

Industrialization of Sugar Production

in streamlined sugar refining methods. Buyers turned increasingly to Cuba,

A DUAL SLAVERY SYSTEM

As Cuba’s plantation economy flourished so did growth in its African slave

The prevailing attitude toward Africans in Cuba gave them a significant

the island-wide movement to incite slave insurrections, and hanged him on

Today the people dazed, wounded,

13. Gott, Cuba, 26–27.

Struggle for Independence, 1868–1898

impaired their ability to form a united opposition to the slave system or to

The Protest of Baraguá

CUBA SUFFERS AN ECONOMIC DEPRESSION

THE INDEPENDENCE WAR

“Our America” by José Martí*

Cuban Independence War

US INTERVENTION IN THE CUBAN INDEPENDENCE WAR

Popular US sentiment to intervene in Cuba’s independence war grew steadily

Multiple Motivations for Intervention

The Route to Asia Lies via Cuba

The Maine Explodes

The anti-Spanish narrative followed naturally from depictions of Weyler’s

THE UNITED STATES DENIES INDEPENDENCE TO CUBA

“A Splendid Little War”

of Independence.14 As a parallel, imagine the US reaction if the French,

US Occupation Follows the Treaty of Paris

5. Richard Hofstadter, “Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny,” in The

From Occupation to “Good Neighbor”