abandoned, an indication of widespread Cuban anti-imperialist sentiment just below the surface.
TABLE 1.2: Direct U.S. Investment in Cuba (millions of dollars)
Source: Through 1954, U.S. Department of Commerce.
FIGURE 1.2: Direct U.S. Investment in Cuba
Any nationalist movement requires a mass base to advance its policies and, given the island’s gross economic inequality, a Cuban nationalist program had to address the region’s social problems if it were to attract support from the impoverished peasants and workers. This gave Cuban nationalism its characteristic nature as a mass popular movement. Such arguments attracted considerable working-class support, with the close relationship between the Cuban bourgeoisie and U.S. imperialism leading many workers to see the national question in class terms. However, this did not often lead to the posing of socialism as an alternative, but merely to seeing the ruling class as “traitors.” Indeed there was no organization in Cuba in the 1950s advocating an openly socialist perspective. While nationalist sentiments dominated Cuban working-class politics in the 1950s, there were various forms they could take, ranging from the revolutionary to the reformist. The labor movement was to be one of the battlegrounds within which the competing approaches would seek support.
In addition to a well-structured bureaucratic trade union organization, there also existed a long tradition of independent action organized unofficially at the rank-and-file level. The informal organization behind this was still actively operating in the early 1950s, despite the mujalista takeover of the official structure. This was particularly true in eastern Cuba where, far from the union head offices in Havana, militants found the need for a greater level of self-help. Insofar as the workers who organized this independent activity were politically affiliated, they tended to be associated either with the PSP, or else with the Auténticos and the Ortodoxos.35 However, the behavior of Eusebio Mujal and his associates largely discredited the Auténticos, with whom he had previously been affiliated, and the death of Eddie Chibas deprived the Ortodoxos of much of their attraction, which was largely based around his charismatic leadership.36 In any case, the Ortodoxos had little to offer workers faced with an employing class and a government concerned to increase profitability. Therefore, the tendencies previously associated with the reformist parties, or at least those who rejected the collaborationist policies of Mujal, were increasingly searching for a militant alternative. The newly formed Movimiento Revolucionario 26 de Julio (MR-26-7) would gain many of its first working-class members from the disillusioned ex-supporters of these reformist organizations, whose anti-communist political trajectory prevented them from seeing the PSP as a potential alternative. In order to understand the political development of these local activists, who were used to operating independently of the union bureaucracy, it may be useful to look at the earlier history of one particular group’s involvement in the Cuban class struggle.
In 1924, the Havana leadership of the Hermandad Ferroviaria (Railway Brotherhood), the main railway trade union, refused to support the railway workers employed by the Ferrocarril del Norte de Cuba (North Cuba Railway) in Morón, members of an independent union who had walked out in solidarity with striking Camaqüey sugar workers. Nevertheless, despite the official attitude, the delegaciones37 in Santiago and Guantánamo soon also walked out in support of their colleagues in Morón and put pressure on the national leadership to change its position. This incident is an example of the level of independence existing in the eastern end of the island where local loyalties were often stronger than formal affiliations to national organizations. Thus in 1943, by which time the CTC was under communist control and had signed a no-strike truce with the first Batista government for the duration of the war, the Guantánamo delegaciónes launched a strike in an attempt to enforce the payment of a 15 percent wage increase that had been decreed by the government, but from which they were excluded.38 A strike during the Second World War was considered unpatriotic by the PSP, given their priority of maximum support for the Allied war effort following the German attack on the Soviet Union. They denounced the strikers’ leaders as “Trotskyites,” and for once this often misused accusation was true.39
In the 1930s, Cuban Trotskyism had its principal base in Guantánamo, where the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR, Revolutionary Workers’ Party)40 was led by a railwayman, Antonio “Ñico” Torres Chedebaux.41 Torres was an experienced working-class militant who started his working life in the sugar industry in the Guantánamo region, but was victimized in 1931 for his involvement in a strike against the Machado dictatorship. In 1934 he joined the POR, along with Gustavo Fraga Jacomino, in time to participate in the party’s intervention in the peasant struggles at Realengo 18, in the mountains near Guantánamo.42 Unemployed and blacklisted for the remainder of the 1930s, Torres finally secured employment on the railway, and in 1942 was elected Secretario de Correspondencia by the members of Delegación 11, from which position he became one of the acknowledged leaders of the Guantánamo labor movement.43 By the mid-1950s, he was part of a loose network of militants that operated very effectively in the Guantánamo region. This network would go on to play a significant role in the developing revolutionary resistance to Batista and would later provide the organizational framework and develop the tactics of the July 26 Movement, led by Fidel Castro.
Statements made at the founding conference of the Cuban Communist Party indicate that when Fidel Castro and 135 others attacked the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953, it was with the intention of provoking an armed popular insurrection aimed at overthrowing the dictatorship.44 A letter written by Castro to Luis Conte Agüero in December 1953 nuances this by suggesting the intention was to provoke a mutiny of army officers who were members of the Ortodoxo Party and that this would, it was hoped, provide a backbone to the popular uprising.45 Whatever the attackers’ motivations, the action itself failed disastrously. However, the torture and murder of many of the attackers revolted a large number of ordinary Cubans and won a measure of sympathy for the young rebels. Castro himself was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but he was released in May 1955 following an amnesty campaign.46 However, finding it impossible to operate in Cuba with his life under threat from agents of the regime, he left for Mexico on June 24.47 He was still technically a member of the Ortodoxos and started organizing the MR-26-7 as a faction inside that party, issuing the first manifesto from Mexico on August 8, 1955.48 This proposed a solution to the country’s problems based on agrarian reform, reestablishing workers’ rights, profit sharing in industry, rent reduction, social housing, the nationalization of foreign-owned utilities, the establishment of a social security system and measures for the state to aid industrialization. This was a radical program, but not one that crossed the bounds of economic nationalism, nor was it explicitly anti-imperialist.
At the founding meeting of the MR-26-7 on June 12, 1955, it was agreed to set up a workers’ section, or sección obrera, to coordinate the movement’s activities among organized labor, national responsibility for which was given to a sugar worker from Camagüey, Luis Bonito.49 Thereafter, every local group of the MR-26-7 that was formed appointed one or more of the leadership team to be responsible for setting up a local sección obrera. The process was uneven at first, with greater initial success in the east. The group of Guantánamo railway workers around Ñico Torres affiliated in September 1955, and the Santiago sección obrera was set up by a worker in the soft drinks industry, Ramón Alvarez Martínez, who, by the middle of November, persuaded the entire workers’ section of the local Ortodoxo Party to join the MR-26-7.50 There were also early organizational moves in Matanzas Province around the textile workers’ leader, Julián Alemán.51 Small and uneven as the MR-26-7 sección obrera was, it had an initial membership with sufficient experience and contacts to be able to recruit from the series of strikes that would break out in 1955.
