Source: U.S. Embassy, Havana, Dispatch 1309 (June 29, 1955).
Much of the Cold War was fought on the battleground of organized labor and the mujalista takeover of the CTC, and the subsequent purges can be seen as part of the Cold War anti-communist offensive. The 1950s were a period of great tension in the Cold War and the extent of communist influence in Cuba was a matter of great concern, often verging on paranoia, as can be seen by the British embassy’s pleasure that the singer Josephine Baker, “this hot gospeller of racism, Peronism and communism,” fell afoul of the military intelligence authorities and was deported from the island.11 The Western powers had a firm public ally in the International Congress of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which had its origins in an anti-communist split from the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in 1949. The CTC affiliated to the ICTFU at its 6th Congress and would go on to organize the anti-communist work of the ICTFU’s Latin American section, the Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT, InterAmerican Regional Organization of Workers), using money provided by Batista, who acted as a “laundry service” for the U.S. State Department.12 A major figure in this process was Serafino Romualdi, who was employed openly by the AFL and covertly by the CIA.13 In retrospect, Romualdi’s 1947 article “Labor and Democracy in Latin America” can be seen as a declaration of Cold War within the international labor movement.14 This resulted in the pro-U.S. ORIT splitting from the Latin American section of the WFTU, the Confederación de Trabajadores de America Latina (CTAL, Latin American Confederation of Workers). Romualdi worked closely with Mujal and Bernardo Ibañez of the Chilean union federation in the setting up of ORIT. He explains in his autobiography that the role of ORIT was not just political anti-communism, but also to create “a new type of Latin American trade union leader who, abandoning the customary concept of the class struggle, would substitute constructive relations between the workers and the employers.”15
This may explain why the ICFTU was completely satisfied with the situation in Cuba under Batista, with the British Foreign Office noting the “refreshing spectacle of an American dictator enjoying the support of ICTFU.”16
Mujal’s anti-communism should not be seen as coming from any principled political position; indeed, he had once been a Communist Party member, but he always managed to be affiliated with the group that most favored his career prospects. His rapprochement with Batista should not therefore have been a great surprise. The logic of a trade union whose practice is based on maintaining a good relationship with the state requires a change of allegiance with each new government. This happened very quickly following Batista’s coup. Apart from a few isolated strikes in particularly well-organized workplaces such as the Matanzas textile industry and some Havana bus routes, there was little response from organized labor to the March 10, 1952, coup. Such working-class resistance that did occur was quickly isolated and crushed.17 The official trade unions made a token show of resistance, with Mujal first calling a general strike and then rapidly calling it off before most workers even heard.18
The majority of the trade union bureaucracy quickly came to an accommodation with the new regime,19 and Mujal went on to become one of Batista’s most loyal collaborators. In return for this collaboration, the government turned a blind eye to corruption and obliged employers to deduct trade union dues from workers’ wages by means of a compulsory checkoff, which isolated the CTC leadership from rank-and-file pressure.20 This measure was to prove deeply unpopular, and, throughout Batista’s period in office, the demand for the abolition of the cuota sindical appeared on every list of workers’ demands. The Havana dockworkers, despite police intervention, made such an issue of the matter that the employers eventually paid the money over to the CTC without deducting it from their wages.21 Its abolition was one of the first acts of the revolutionary government on seizing power in 1959.
This, therefore, is the context in which mujalismo, nationalism, and communism, the three major tendencies within Cuban organized labor, came to contest the leadership of the movement.
Mujalismo
The mujalistas, as the leadership of the CTC around Eusebio Mujal have come to be known, were widely seen as being extremely corrupt. Their corruption was indeed a contributing factor in their support for the Batista regime, but another equally important factor can be found in the nature of trade union bureaucracy in a capitalist society.
Trade unions, as their name implies, are organized around sectional divisions that reflect the economic structure of capitalism, which in turn institutionalizes the divisions between different groups of workers. This allows the government to confront workers sector by sector and thereby avoid a generalized response, which could otherwise overwhelm the forces of the state deployed in support of the employers. As long as the role of a union is seen as defending workers’ interests within the capitalist mode of production, with its differential wage structure, these divisions will remain. It would appear impractical in this context to discuss the wages of bank clerks and sugar workers in the same negotiations. Trade union bureaucracy is based on the sectional nature of the unions and arises from a division of labor between the ordinary workers and those who negotiate on their behalf. This bureaucracy has developed interests of its own, different from the mass of workers it represents, which depend on the ability to mediate between capital and labor. This leads to a more conservative social view, even among those who started their trade union career as class-conscious militants, with a resulting propensity to vacillate. The actions of full-time trade union officials will largely depend on the balance of conflicting forces; employer or state pressure from above and rank-and-file pressure from below.
One of the common traits of trade unions everywhere is a tendency to avoid mass working-class involvement in politics, as any such involvement must raise the question of state power and on whose behalf it is being used. This in turn would bring the economic structure of society into question and threaten the comfortable position of full-time officials, who depend upon having two antagonistic classes to mediate between. This, of course, does not prevent individual trade union leaders from pursuing personal political careers, but this is normally kept separate from their industrial functions, maintaining the fiction of a distinction between the “political” and the “economic” that lies at the heart of reformist labor politics. None of this is to say that individual trade union officials cannot rise above these pressures and act in a militant class-conscious fashion,
