UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND

ARCHEOLOGY

COURSE: REVOLUTIONS IN WORLD HISTORY: CHS 557

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION OF 1959

ANNE WATETU MUSOMBA C5O/76225/2009

PETER MWAMACHI C50/79061

PRESENTED TO: PROF. SIMIYU

PRESENTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENT FOR THE AWARD OF MASTERS IN ARTS DEGREE
IN ARMED CONFLICT AND PEACE STUDIES.

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION OF 1959

Fidel Castro proclaimed The Cuban Revolution of January 1959 a true revolution. A new
society was forged with the triumph of Castro’s organization, the Twenty sixth of July
Movement and with the institutionalization of a Marxist Leninist government. This paper
explores the historical background of the revolution and the policies that made it both a
success and a failure.

Key Events of the Revolution

To comprehend the true nature of the Cuban Revolution, one must first exploit the
background history, from independence to the reign of Fulgencia Batista who was
eventually overthrown by Fidel Castor, the moving force behind the Cuban Revolution.

From Independence to Revolution

From 1895 to 1897, the War of Independence between Cuba and Spain was a protracted
conflict. The war ended when the USA intervened and occupied the island in 1898. This
intervention occurred as the war was starting to turn in favor of the Cubans. Although the
Cubans collaborated with the US troops and constituted the fundamental land force that
permitted the swift US victory, they were ignored during the peace negotiations at the
Treaty of Paris of 1898. The USA aided in the reconstruction of the war torn country,
improving health conditions and education. US investments and the return of Spanish
capital contributed to economic recovery.

When US occupation (1898 1902) ended, there was one agreement that was to prove the
trigger for USA/Cuban resentment. This was the Platt Amendment, which was imposed
by the USA as a requisite for turning over the country to the Cubans and was
consequently attached to the Cuban Constitution. This amendment, drafted by US
Senator Orville Platt, gave the USA the power to intervene militarily in the island and
restricted the Cuban government in its international relations.

Traditional and pseudo Marxist historiography reduces US Cuban relations to the events
that occurred in and after 1898. In this view, 1898 marks the date in which Cuba stopped
being a Spanish colony to become a US one. The truth is far more complex. Cuba’s
economic dependence on US trade was a fact by the mid nineteenth century. Cuba was
the world’s foremost producer of sugar and the USA imported 90 percent of Cuba’s
production. The USA had also been a refuge for Cubans who aspired to independence.
The first Cuban political party was created by exiles in the USA under the leadership of
Jose Marti. Marti, although not anti USA, feared and staunchly opposed North American
intervention. At the end of the war, the economic ties between the countries continued to
play a direct role in US Cuban relations.

Liberalism, political participation, the absence of strong partisanship, electoral fraud,

administrative graft, and civil unrest characterized the early republic. The
postindependence concentration of US and Spanish capital in the sugar industry, together
with the Spaniards domination of banking and commerce, rendered participation in the
government the main vehicle for economic success for many Cubans. The Creole elite
had been nearly destroyed. Spain did not compensate Cubans for the loss of property
during the war. Armed struggle was often a means to ensure circulation of elites in public
office. The USA intervened militarily to establish order on two occasions and occupied
the island for a second time from 1906 to 1909.

Cuba’s economy continued to depend on sugar exports. By 1902, the almost miraculous
recovery of the sugar industry had turned Cuba into the world’s second largest producer.
The preferential tariff treatment accorded by the USA in the Reciprocity Treaty of 1903
reinforced the preeminence of sugar, hindered economic diversification, and heightened
Cuba’s dependence on the USA.

Sugar production and prices rose during and after World War I. The prosperity created a
Cuban born entrepreneurial class with a nationalist agenda. In the 1920s, the collapse of
sugar prices and the Cuban banking crash plunged the nation into economic chaos. By
1923, students and workers had joined industrialists and intellectuals demanding
abrogation of the Platt Amendment, curtailment of government concessions to foreigners,
and the end to the country’s dependence on sugar.

General Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship (1925 33), coupled with the US government’s
interference and plummeting sugar exports were the catalysts for the revolution of 1933.
A provisional revolutionary government was installed and president, Dr. Ramon Grau
abrogated the Platt Amendment unilaterally. His administration, which enacted social,
political, and economic reforms, encountered the unswerving opposition of the USA.
Benjamin Sumner Welles, the US ambassador, and other opponents denounced the
measures as too radical. Although Welles requested US military intervention,
Washington opted to withhold diplomatic recognition of Grau’s administration. It was
axiomatic that no Cuban government could survive without US support. Strikes
continued, and in the eastern provinces workers seized some sugar mills and established
Soviets. On January 1934, Fulgencio Batista, promoted to army chief of staff, deposed
Dr. Grau. Although short lived, the 1933 revolution challenged US hegemony, introduced
changes in Cuba’s socioeconomic and political structure, and rekindled nationalism. In
1934, the USA abrogated the Platt Amendment, signaling a curtailment of Washington’s
interference in Cuban affairs.

Batista ruled by proxy until 1940, when he was elected president. The Partido
Revolucionario Cu bano (Autentico) came to power with the presidential election of Dr.
Ramon Grau (1944 48). Cubans expected a continuation of the reformist policies enacted
during Grau’s short administration in the 1930s. Those reforms, incorporated into the
1940 constitution, reflected the revolutionary spirit of the 1930s. Unfortunately, many of
the significant political and socioeconomic advances of the Autenticos were combined
with governmental graft, corruption, and political gangsterism, which was also the case
with the autentics administration of Carlos Prio Socarras (1948 52).

In 1947, Eduardo Chibas, a disaffected Autentico, founded the Partido del Pueblo
Cubano (Ortodoxo). The Ortodoxos represented the hopes of a generation for whom the
promises of the 1933 revolution remained unfulfilled. Political legitimacy and honesty in
public office were at the core of his movement. Chibas’s suicide in 1951 created a
leadership vacuum and renewed the frustration that plagued Cuban society. A coup, on
March 10, 1952, led by General Fulgencio Batista, ended the constitutional experience
two months before the 1952 elections. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro, a young Ortodoxo,
who had run for office in the 1952 elections pre empted by General Batista’s coup,
organized the unsuccessful attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The
daring act provided publicity for Castro and for his nascent anti Batista organization, the
Twenty sixth of July Movement. When Batista refused the demands for free elections
made by a coalition seeking a nonviolent solution to the crisis, the Federation Estudiantil
Universitaria (FEU) called for a student strike, and violence escalated. In 1956, Castro
and Jose A. Echeverria, FEU president and head of the Directorio Revolucionario
Estudiantil (DRE), joined forces. By December, Castro and his followers had established
guerrilla operations in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, in Cuba’s westernmost
province of Oriente. On March of 1957, the Autenticos and the DRE stormed the
presidential palace and Echeverria was killed in a separate incident during the failed
assault. A growing number of the professionals and entrepreneurs joined the fight as the
government’s repression mounted. Other guerrilla fronts were then established and the
underground initiated a terrorist campaign. Several conspiracies in the armed forces were
discovered between 1956 and 1957. In 1958, the USA imposed an arms embargo on the
Cuban government; a military offensive against the rebels failed and they in turn
mounted a counteroffensive. Batista was deposed by a coup in December. On January 1,
1959, the army surrendered to the Rebel Army and the unanticipated communist
revolution began its course. The Cuban communist party, Partido Socialista Popular
(PSP), had been critical of Castro’s Moncada attack and barely participated in the
struggle against Batista until 1958. Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, however, was a
communist and may have established contacts with the international communists at the
Sierra Maestra.

On the eve of the revolution, Cuba was a developing nation ranking among the top five
countries in Latin America. The movement to depose President Batista was not anti
Yankee, nor anticapitalist, antibourgeois, or nationalist. By the 1950s, radical nationalism
was mostly confined to the intellectual elite. Although the anti Batista movement had
ultimately a heterogeneous class base, members of the middle classes seemed to have
comprised the core of the active participants, particularly in the urban underground.
Among the insurrectionists, there was also an obvious presence of individuals of middle
and upper class backgrounds, such as the Castro brothers and some of their closest
collaborators. The Twenty sixth of July Movement and the other anti Batista groups
focused on political freedom, constitutionality, and fiscal integrity, which were the issues
concerning the Cuban middle classes. Castro’s social and economic planks were based on
the implementation of the provisions of the constitution of 1940, which included agrarian
reform.

1.2 Revolution (1959 1970)

Between 1959 and 1961 Cuban society was transformed. Foreign and domestic properties
were gradually expropriated. Political parties, elections, freedom of the press, and labor’s
right to strike were eliminated. Universities, labor unions, and professional associations
were purged. The 1940 constitution was proclaimed to be outdated, and the USA was
identified as Cuba’s enemy. A new currency destroyed the power of the upper and middle
classes. All criticism was declared as counterrevolutionary, and political opponents were
imprisoned or executed. The first massive flight into exile of Cuba’s entrepreneurial and
professional sectors was initiated.

Cuba’s foreign relations changed just as rapidly. Soviet military advisers and weapons
began arriving by September of 1960. In October, the USA imposed a trade embargo and
diplomatic relations between the two countries were severed in January 1961. That same
year, an invasion was launched by Cuban exiles that had received covert military training
and support from the US government. The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of April of
1961 consolidated the revolution. The underground was crushed, as an estimated 100,000
persons were detained. On the eve of the invasion, Castro proclaimed the socialist nature
of the revolution. One month later, diplomatic relations were reestablished with the
USSR, and on December 2, Castro declared himself, for the first time, a Marxist Leninist.

In 1962, after a US Air Force reconnaissance aircraft discovered the construction of

missile launching sites and offensive Soviet intermediate ballistic missiles in Cuba, an
international crisis between the two superpowers ensued. The outcome of the missile
crisis had a dual impact on Cuba’s foreign policy. When the USA promised the USSR not
to invade Cuba in exchange for the Soviet removal of missiles, any viable external threat
was eliminated; however, the Cubans felt betrayed, as the compromise was reached
without consulting them. Cuba then sought new allies by promoting and supporting
revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. In 1967, these policies and the
arrests of several members of the Cuban communist party that followed the Soviet line
strained Cuban Soviet relations. The USSR retaliated by decreasing the amount of
petroleum deliveries to the island.

Cuba attempted to chart an independent course during the 1960s. It was, however, facing
trading problems similar to those experienced during colonial times. It had changed a
trading partner 140 km from its shores for one more than 4,500 km away. By 1963, an ill
conceived industrialization program and the neglect of Cuba’s main cash crop caused the
progressive indebtedness of the country. The leadership turned again to sugar and a ten
million ton sugar harvest was programmed for 1970. The sugar industry, however, was in
shambles by 1964. Professional administrators had gone into exile or were substituted
with politically trustworthy personnel, while expert cane cutters had been transferred to
other activities or incorporated into the militia. Already facing the failure of its
international policies and domestic economic strategies, coupled with the US embargo,
the impact of the Soviet sanctions on the regime was catastrophic. In 1968, Castro
supported the USSR invasion of Czechoslovakia, signaling Cuba’s capitulation to Soviet
hegemony and Castro’s determination to remain in power at any cost.

By the mid 1960s the revolution was giving unequivocal signs of fatigue. Juvenile
delinquency and crime were on the rise. Disaffected Cubans, together with priests,
seminarians and homosexuals, drafted into Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP),
were interned in concentration camps from 1965 to 1967. The 1968 Revolutionary
Offensive nationalized the remaining small businesses. Low worker morale and
absenteeism led to low productivity and poor product quality. The strategy of moral
incentives failed to mobilize the majority of workers, who were no longer imbued by the
revolutionary zeal. The revolutionary process had spent itself by 1970.

1.3 Institutionalization and Foreign Military Adventurism

After 1970 Soviet political and economic models were adopted. Some material incentives
were implemented, and peasant markets opened. Institutionalization, however, continued
under the charismatic guidance and legitimization of Castro’s leadership. In 1974, Leonid
Brezhnev’s visit consolidated Cuban Soviet relations. A year later Cuba’s African
campaigns began with Soviet support, and in 1979 Castro was elected president of the
Nonaligned Movement. Cuba’s support of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, however,
diminished its prestige and its claims to nonaligned status.

Although increases in Soviet aid led to improvements in living standards, over 120,000
Cubans abandoned the island during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. By 1986, the failure of the
Soviet models was indisputable. The crisis was compounded by the US embargo being
turned again into a powerful economic weapon by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the
breakup of the USSR. By the 1980s Soviet subsidies had reached S3 billion a year. The
Soviet Union supplied: 90 percent of the island’s oil needs and an inordinate proportion
of basic foodstuffs. To confront the crisis, Castro launched the Rectification of Errors
Campaign at the Third Party Congress. Material incentives and market reforms were
eliminated, and mass mobilization and volunteer work were reintroduced.

In 1989, the arrest, trial, and execution of Division General Arnaldo Ochoa and of the
interior ministry’s Colonel Antonio de la Guardia signaled an institutional crisis. They
were accused of drug dealing and breaching national security. A massive purge followed
and several government agencies were dismantled. Many Cubans suspected that General
Ochoa had supported political liberalization and economic reforms.
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http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/SHIA/REP.HTM