Harry Targ
Before Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement seized power in
Cuba in January, 1959, the United States had long controlled the island nation
ninety miles from its shores. The country was ruled by dictator, Fulgencio
Batista, a close ally of the United States, who, through repression and
corruption, generated large-scale opposition in the countryside and the cities.
In 1958 the State Department urged Batista to turn control over to a caretaker
government, to forestall the victory of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camillo
Cienfuegos, Vilma Espin, and their growing guerrilla armies, who were on the
verge of overthrowing the dictator. Batista rejected the pressure to flee. His
U.S. backed armies and police were defeated. The revolutionaries were
victorious.
Before the revolution, United States investors controlled
80 percent of Cuba’s utilities, 90 percent of its mines, 90 percent of its
cattle ranches, its three oil refineries, half its railroads, and 40 percent of
its sugar. In a land rich with human and natural resources and a modern
infrastructure and a tourist sector second to none in the Hemisphere, 600,000
Cubans were unemployed, more than half the population lived in slums, and
one-half the population had no access to electricity. Forty percent of the Cuban
population was illiterate; most Cubans spent much of their income on rent, and
among wealthy Cubans, 1.5 percent of landowners owned 46 percent of the land.
When the Castro-led revolutionaries assumed office, they
began to develop a series of policies to alleviate the worst features of Cuban
poverty. The revolutionary government invested in housing, schools, and public
works. Salaries were raised, electrical rates were cut, and rents were reduced
by half. On a visit to the United States in April, 1959, Castro, who had
proposed a large-scale assistance program for the Western Hemisphere to the
Eisenhower Administration, was ignored by the President.
(The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the
problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education and
the problem of the people’s health: these are the six problems we would take
immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and
political democracy (Fidel Castro, “ History Will Absolve Me,” Castro Internet
Archive, www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953)
Returning from a hostile visit to Washington, Castro
announced a redistributive program of agrarian reform that generated opposition
from conservative Cuban and American landowners. These policies involved
transfers of land to the Cuban people from the huge estates owned by the
wealthy. The Eisenhower administration responded by reducing the quantity of
United States purchases of Cuban sugar. Cuba then nationalized the industry.
In February, 1960 Cuba signed trade agreements with the former Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed to exchange their oil for sugar no longer purchased by the U.S. When the U.S. owned oil refineries refused to refine the Soviet oil, the Cuban government nationalized them. An aide to President Eisenhower recommended that the US launch an economic blockade of the island to starve the Cuban people. Then, the argument went, they would rise up against their new government.
In July, 1960, the U.S. cut all sugar purchases. Over the
next several months the Cuban government nationalized U.S. owned corporations
and banks on the island. Therefore, between the spring of 1960 and January 1961
U.S. and Cuban economic ties came to a halt and the island nation had
established formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Shortly before
Eisenhower left office, the break was made symbolically complete with the U.S.
termination of formal diplomatic relations with Cuba.
As U.S./Cuban economic and diplomatic tensions were
escalating, President Eisenhower made a decision that in the future would lead
the world to the brink of nuclear war. In March,1960, he ordered the Central
Intelligence Agency to create a Cuban exile force that would invade the island
and depose Fidel Castro. Even the State Department knew at that time that
Castro was enormously popular.
In April, 1961, the newly elected President Kennedy was
presented with an invasion plan by the CIA. The agency claimed that the
right-wing Cubans would be greeted as heroes when they landed at the Bay of
Pigs. After the Castro regime was overthrown, all private assets would be
returned, and a Batista-like government would be reestablished.
The Bay of Pigs invasion, April 17-19, 1961, was launched
by fifteen hundred Cuban exiles. It was an immediate failure: close
to 300 invaders were killed and the rest captured. No uprising against the
revolutionary government occurred. Kennedy was criticized in the United States
for not providing sufficient air support to protect the invading army. The
critics ignored the fact that the revolutionary government had the support of
workers and peasants who would fight to defend it.
After the invasion attempt failed, President Kennedy warned
of the danger of the “menace of external Communist intervention and domination
in Cuba.” He saw a need to respond to Communism, whether in Cuba or South
Vietnam. In the face of perceived Communist danger to the Western Hemisphere,
he reserved the right to intervene as needed. The lesson he drew from the Bay
of Pigs was the need for escalated adventurism, not caution Every
administration, with the exception of the opening of US/Cuban relations during
the Obama presidency, has maintained the economic blockade and in other ways
sought to undermine and/or overthrow the Cuban Revolution. And today the Trump
Administration is continuing this tradition-placing Cuba on the list of
terrorist nations, demanding that other countries withdraw their commercial
ties with Cuba, and blocking Cuban access to oil, And now, the Trump
Administration has indicted former Cuban President Raul Castro because the
Cuban government shot down an anti-Cuban spy plane in 1996.
The Issue is U.S. Imperialism and Cuba as an Alternative
for the Global South
As described by Stephen Kinzer in Overthrow (Times
Books, 2006) the United States had been engaging in efforts to undermine and
overthrow independent governments around the world, and particularly in the
Western Hemisphere, ever since it took Hawaii in the 1890s. In fact, the Cuban
revolution of 1898 against Spanish colonialism was usurped by U.S. forces
followed by a full-scale occupation of the country, the institutionalization of
a protectorate until 1934 and then indirect economic and political domination,
lasting until 1959.
Further, as so many accounts of U.S./Cuban relations
suggest, the interests of the Cuban people never figured in U.S. policy toward
the island. The economic blockade and diplomatic embargo of the island amounted
to a 66-year effort to strangle, not only the regime, but the Cuban people. A
truism of US policy is and has been that others must be forced to sacrifice for
the U.S. imperial agenda.
Also, the Bay of Pigs fiasco suggests that U.S. foreign
policy decision-makers almost always misjudged the will of the people who would
be subjected to military action. Ruling classes, by their very nature, are
unable to understand the interests, passions, and visions of the great masses
of people. The Director of the CIA in 1961 and other members of the President’s
inner circle were incapable of understanding that the Cuban people supported
their revolution, so they ignored State Department polling data.
Finally, as recent policies toward Venezuela; interventions
in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Ukraine; and the so-called Asian pivot all
suggest is that the United States since the dawn of the twentieth century has
pursued global hegemony. Any challenge to that hegemony, such as the Cuban
Revolution, is defined as a security issue. It fact, nations and peoples who
seek their independence as reflected in the idea of revolution constitute a
threat that must be undermined.
The Vision of the Cuban Revolution Remains
...the Cuban revolution (even until this
day) has constituted a living experiment that most progressive forces around
the world identify with. Even though each society has its own history, class
structure, level of development, and revolutionary potential, Cuba’s desire to
create a government to serve its people and at the same time to transform them
from a traditional consciousness to a revolutionary consciousness is shared by
progressives everywhere. For progressives, Cuba is a laboratory, a grand social
experiment that will provide knowledge for others as they seek fundamental
change in their own societies... Cuba’s successes in the years ahead are
successes of all progressive forces and, similarly Cuba’s defeats are defeats
for all who wish to create egalitarian and humane societies.
(Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International
Publishers, 1992, 6):
