After the 1898 “Spanish-American
War”, the United States military, with the support of small numbers of
compliant Cubans, created a government that would open the door completely for
United States investments, commercial penetration, an externally-controlled
tourist sector, and North American gangsters. The U.S. neo-colonial regime on
the island stimulated pockets of economic development in a sea of human misery.
Responding to grotesque economic suffering in the 1950s a band of
revolutionaries (led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Celia
Sanchez, Vilma Espin, and Haydee Santamaria) defeated the U.S. backed military regime of
Fulgencio Batista.
Vilma Espin, Cuban
Revolutionary
The Cuban Revolution of
1959 began in the nineteenth century and was driven by 400 years of
nationalism, a vision of democracy, and a passion for economic justice. This
vision was articulated in Fidel Castro’s famous “History Will Absolve Me”
speech given before being sentenced to prison after a failed military action
against Batista in 1953. He spoke of five goals of his revolution: returning
power to the people; giving land to the people who work it; providing workers a
significant share of profits from corporations; granting sugar planters a quota
of the value of the crop they produce; and confiscating lands acquired through
fraud. Then he said, the Revolution would carry out agrarian reform,
nationalize key sectors of the economy, institute educational reforms, and
provide a decent livelihood for manual and intellectual labor.
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).
Almost immediately the
revolutionaries who had seized power in January, 1959 began to implement the
program envisioned by the Castro speech. Over the next sixty years, with heated
debates inside Cuba, experiments--some successful, some failed--were carried
out. Despite international pressures and the changing global political economy,
much of the program has been institutionalized to the benefit of most Cubans.
Education and health
care became free to all Cubans. Basic, but modest, nutritional needs have been
met. Cubans have participated in significant political discussion about public
policy. And Cuban society has been a laboratory for experimentation.
