the question of raising the level of productivity crucial for the Cuban employing class. In order to achieve this, they had to reduce staffing levels and wage rates. This did not seem to present too great a problem for the employers.
However, though workers may tolerate an undemocratic and corrupt leadership of their unions when their livelihoods are not in jeopardy, they can be much less tolerant when they see their wages and working conditions in jeopardy. The increasing difficulties faced by the Cuban economy, along with the employers’ determination to maintain their profit margins at their employees’ expense seemed to call for a more robust response than the CTC leadership was prepared to organize. Thus the question of working-class action can be reformulated to ask whether rank-and-file militants were able to overcome the dead hand of the bureaucracy and organize their fellow workers to fight for their interests.
2. A CRISIS OF PRODUCTIVITY
The assumption that economic conditions were not a significant factor in developing mass opposition to the Batista regime has resulted in a neglect of the class struggle in the period leading up to the regime’s overthrow, and the argument that Cuba was prosperous compared to other Latin American countries leads to the revolution being seen as an anomaly. This approach fails to look at the Cuban economy with particular reference to the way in which workers were affected by changes in economic conditions. This is important in assessing the role of organized labor in the Cuban Revolution, for if changes in the political economy of the island resulted in a deterioration of the working and living conditions of workers, then this will have a bearing on the form and degree of their involvement in the revolutionary process.
The whole Cuban economy was dependent on sugar, which in the 1950s provided 80 percent of the island’s exports. There was some other industry, but the tobacco industry was the only other major exporter, with the result that it was commonly said that “sin azúcar, no hay país” (without sugar, there is no nation).1 There was a large civil service, but this required a buoyant sugar market to finance it. This situation left the country highly dependent on the international price of sugar. As a result of sugar’s overwhelming importance, any deterioration in the price or the amount that could be sold in export had serious consequences for the rest of the economy. It is therefore logical to set any investigation of the Cuban economy in the context of Cuba’s position in the international sugar market and to ask whether the price fluctuations of the 1950s were serious enough to merit reference to an economic crisis. Yet, if there were indeed severe problems, why do many authors refer to Cuba being “prosperous” during this period?2
The real question is how one defines “prosperity.” It can be seen either as an environment in that business can make large profits, or alternatively as a system that provides a high standard of living for the whole society, not just for the middle and upper classes. In Cuba in the 1950s, the productivity measures that business interests wished to implement in an attempt to maintain their profit margins were achieved by layoffs and by increasing workloads for the same or lower wages. An approach that considers only GDP and similar broad indicators gives a distorted view. As Jorge Ibarra Cuesta demonstrates, an increase in per capita income, when combined with higher unemployment and wage cuts for many of those in work, results in an increase in inequality.3 The struggle over the surplus produced by labor frequently takes ideological form in a discussion of the need for productivity increases, which can be portrayed by the employers as contributing to the common good. This argument was rejected by militant sections of organized labor, who had a tradition of fighting to defend what they saw as their rights, irrespective of the economic problems faced by their employers. This led many employers in Cuba at this time to feel that they needed an authoritarian regime to defeat working-class resistance to measures that would increase productivity. There is, therefore, a link between the fall in the price of sugar, the resulting crisis of profitability, and the employers’ need to increase productivity that provides an explanation for the 1952 military coup and the support given to the resulting dictatorship by business interests.
Economic Dependence and the Power of Sugar
Following U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence, known to the North Americans as the Spanish-American War, the island received its formal independence in 1902 on condition that the new constitution contained a clause, known as the Platt Amendment after the U.S. senator who proposed it, that gave the United States the unilateral right to intervene in Cuban affairs. This constitutional arrangement was accompanied by a treaty of reciprocity that structured economic relations between the two countries to the advantage of the United States. In these circumstances, American capital quickly came to dominate the Cuban economy in general and the sugar industry in particular. Even if legally independent, the island was effectively a U.S. colony whose economy was overwhelmingly dominated by the production of sugar.4
Between 1895 and 1925, world production of sugar rose from 1 million to 25 million tons, and by the end of this period Cuba, with annual harvests of around 5 million tons, was the most important single producer.5 In the second decade of the twentieth century, a speculative boom known as the “Dance of the Millions,” largely financed by loans from U.S. banks, collapsed, and most of the Cuban sugar industry passed into American ownership when those banks foreclosed.6 U.S. capital’s control of the sugar industry throughout the early years of the republic ensured its domination of the wider economy.7 Even though the Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934, following an uprising against the dictatorial regime of Gerardo Machado, a new reciprocity treaty was signed the same year that was even less favorable than the first.8 However, over the next twenty years the nature of the relationship between the two countries changed as U.S. capital moved away from direct ownership of sugar production into indirect control through banking, as well as making considerable profit from the control of utilities such as electricity and telephones. Nevertheless, by 1958, U.S. capital still owned 42 percent of the productive capacity of the Cuban sugar industry.9 Between 1948 and 1955, $637 million in profits from sugar alone was repatriated to the United States, an important loss of capital that could otherwise have been used for internal economic development in Cuba.10
As the pattern of U.S. involvement in the economy changed, there was a parallel process of integration of the Cuban bourgeoisie into U.S. capitalism.11 The Reciprocity Treaty of 1934 gave preferential access for Cuban sugar to the U.S. market, and in return U.S. manufactured products were subject to lower import duty, thereby impeding the development of a Cuban manufacturing industry. The Cuban non-sugar bourgeoisie tended to spread their interests between commercial and manufacturing undertakings. This contradiction prevented them adopting a unified class position on such matters as import/export or industrial development because, as importers, they opposed local production of anything that might compete with their imports, and as manufacturers they wanted protection for their own locally produced products. This prevented the adoption of a united position on protective tariffs, as each manufacturer argued for his individual advantage while having little material interest in supporting the claims of manufacturers of other products. Only the sugar bourgeoisie had a consistent position, one opposed to Cuban national industrialization because they wanted the maximum trade in Cuba’s sugar. Sugar had dominated the Cuban economy for a very long time and had survived previous crises, so they saw no reason to diversify into other industries. Rather, they hoped to use their dominant position yet again to restore profitability, even if it was at the expense of the island’s other economic interests. Additionally, agricultural employers gained an advantage from a high level of unemployment to ensure sufficient available cheap labor at harvest time, giving them another reason to oppose industrialization. Thus the most consistent business influence on government economic policy was in a direction that maintained Cuban dependence on sugar and was against any industrial development or diversification.12
Much of the rest of the economy was linked to sugar production, more or less directly. The major export traffic through the ports was sugar, and sugar played a dominant role in the development of the railway system.13 Important sectors of manufacturing
