the region, with a large street demonstration bringing the center of Guantánamo to a standstill.23 The following day, the workers reported for work but initiated a paso de jicotea,24 a work slowdown that caused widespread disruption to the service.25 Taken aback by the level of resistance, the government declared a truce, suspended the cuts, set up a commission of inquiry with trade union and employer representation, and gave the company a further loan.26
FFCC Consolidados also owned four bus companies operating in Santiago de Cuba: La Cubana, La Cubanita, La Criolla, and La Mambisa. It tried to use the period of the truce to impose cost-saving measures by locking out the workers in these companies. Many of their colleagues in the other two bus companies in the city withdrew their labor in solidarity; the strike in La Oriental was solid, but only partial on Autobuses Modelos. The army started rounding up drivers and forcing them to take out their buses. In protest, a number of drivers occupied their local union offices and started a hunger strike but were soon evicted by the police. The police intervention was said to be at the request of Prisciliano Falcón, a leading mujalista official in Santiago. The hunger strike then moved to the offices of Delegación 12 of the railway union and continued for seventy-two hours, after which the company backed down, the lockout was suspended, and arrears of salary were paid.27
The company also used the railway truce for an extensive press campaign, which consisted of newspaper advertisements, press statements, and carefully placed interviews that argued that railway workers were being paid for hours they did not work and that wages had risen much faster than receipts.28 One advertisement asserted that for every peso of income, the company expended one peso and 23 cents, of which 91 cents was in wage costs. In particular, the company complained that it was not benefiting from its modernization program, giving the example that it only took ten hours to get from Santa Clara to Santiago, but the crews were still paid for the twenty hours it had taken before the company had invested shareholders’ money for infrastructure improvements.29 In this last argument, we see encapsulated the employers’ position on productivity: having invested money for technological improvements, they expected their wage bill to decrease. However, with little prospect of other jobs, the majority of the workers saw no reason why they should have their staffing levels or pay reduced in order to maintain or increase profit margins, a classic dispute about who should benefit from technological progress. There was little room for compromise between these two entrenched positions.
The railway workers were not idle during the truce period either, setting up a Comisión de Propaganda y Finanzas (Finance and Propaganda Committee) to coordinate the resistance. This body organized some short strikes in the Guantánamo region.30 Having access to typewriters and duplicating machines, as well as the skills to use them, the women in the administration took a significant role in the production of propaganda material. When the truce ended on January 20, the company announced that it would withhold 35 to 40 percent of the workers’ wages, suspend paid holidays, and make other similar economy measures.31 As soon as the announcement was made, the Camagüey office workers again demonstrated, loudly proclaiming that they would not implement the cuts.32 Despite government intervention to postpone the problem again, a move greeted as a victory by the CTC bureaucracy, the rail workers themselves did not trust the government and walked out on February 3.33 The strike spread throughout the network, with many violent confrontations between the police, army, and striking workers, along with extensive solidarity actions by workers in other trades. Carta Semanal reports that in Morón, local bus and taxi drivers went on solidarity strike and a women’s support group was set up in the town.34 A large number of neighborhood support networks were set up by the female relatives of railwaymen, helped by the women from the offices, similar to the women’s support groups of the British miners’ strike of 1984–85. Women’s groups would also be set up by the relatives of dockers and sugar workers during their own strikes later the same year. These actions by women were frequently a force for unity among workers of different trades as the women’s groups were usually based in the areas where they lived and were able to use their positions in the neighborhood to build links of solidarity.
Many of the ports were also owned by the railway companies and dockers in Boquerón and Nuevitas struck in support of their railway colleagues, as a result of which 58,000 sacks of sugar lay idle on the dock.35 Other port workers in Matanzas, Caimanera, and Manzanillo took advantage of the opportunity to publicly demonstrate both in support of the railway workers and to express their own opposition to bulk loading of sugar.36 It should be remembered that the port workers had a very good practical reason for their solidarity as they recognized that they might need railway support later in their battle to reject a series of productivity measures with which their own industry was threatened. The most public demonstrations of solidarity took place in Camagüey where the CTC Federación Provincial (Provincial Federation) discussed the possibility of a general strike, while many workers independently took part in ten-minute solidarity strikes. All this activity resulted in numerous arrests, in response to which the women of Camagüey organized a demonstration demanding the release of all prisoners.37
With the zafra (sugar harvest) having only just started, following some difficult negotiations that had left many sugar workers deeply unhappy, Batista was concerned not to provide a pole of resistance that might have inspired disgruntled sugar workers in a movement that could have escaped the control of the trade union bureaucracy. The government therefore decreed another truce on February 8 while the Tribunal de Cuentas, the government accountancy service, investigated the situation of the company, this time for one hundred days. This new truce was funded with another 700,000 pesos.38 The official union comité conjunto (joint committee), which had been set up by the CTC to oversee the action, ordered a return to work without consulting mass meetings in the depots. In Guantánamo, Delegación 11, the local organization of the Hermandad Ferroviaria covering the membership who worked for FFCC Consolidados, denounced the truce as a sell-out and continued the strike until the 11th, when, following Mujal’s personal intervention, they were paid in cash, thereby overcoming the company’s attempt to pay 70 percent in cash and the rest in scrip until the government subsidy arrived.39 The line from Caibarien to Morón was reportedly still not working normally on February 17.40 A special congress of the Federación Nacional Ferroviaria (the national federation of railway unions, including the Hermandad Ferroviaria and unions of office workers) was called to ratify the actions of the officials and, given that most of the delegations had not been elected by assemblies of the workers, such ratification was granted, although only after considerable bureaucratic manipulation from the chair.41 Once assured that the official trade union machinery was back in control and further unofficial action was unlikely, the regime moved against some of the militants, with the Santa Clara courts condemning eighteen bus drivers and seventy-two railwaymen for huelga ilícita (illegal strike action).42
Following the end of the sugar harvest, the report of Tribunal de Cuentas recommended an 8 percent wage cut, forced retirements, scrapping the collective agreement, abolishing many bonuses, and lengthening the working day, as well as extensive service cuts.43 Batista accepted the report and published decree number 1535 on June 7, the so-called “Laudo Ferroviario” (railway arbitration decision), which implemented the recommended measures and gave the company an annual subsidy of 600,000 pesos.44 Within forty-eight hours Guantánamo was again out on strike, quickly followed by Camagüey and Santiago, 10,000 workers in all.45 Now that the sugar harvest was safely gathered in, the full force of the state was moved against the workers, the army was mobilized, the Ministry of Labor denied the very existence of the strike, and the CTC leadership condemned it out of hand. The strikers replied by organizing ciudades-muertas or “dead towns” across the region, completely shutting down Camagüey, Guantánamo, Morón, Nuevitas, and Santiago. The tactic of ciudad-muerta was a form of civic general strike in which not only did the other workers in a town strike in sympathy but most business and commerce also closed their doors. The bus workers in Santiago who worked in companies owned by the FFCC Consolidados also walked out again and, on May 9, set up camp on the town hall patio in protest.46 The CTC, realizing
