A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution
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Millions of words have been written about the Cuban Revolution, which, to both its supporters and detractors, is almost universally understood as being won by a small band of guerillas. In this unique and stimulating book, Stephen Cushion turns the conventional wisdom on its head, and argues that the Cuban working class played a much more decisive role in the Revolution’s outcome than previously understood. Although the working class was well-organized in the 1950s, it is believed to have been too influenced by corrupt trade union leaders, the Partido Socialist Popular, and a tradition of making primarily economic demands to have offered much support to the guerillas. Cushion contends that the opposite is true, and that significant portions of the Cuban working class launched an underground movement in tandem with the guerillas operating in the mountains.Developed during five research trips to Cuba under the auspices of the Institute of Cuban History in Havana, this book analyzes a wealth of leaflets, pamphlets, clandestine newspapers, and other agitational material from the 1950s that has never before been systematically examined, along with many interviews with participants themselves. Cushion uncovers widespread militant activity, from illegal strikes to sabotage to armed conflict with the state, all of which culminated in two revolutionary workers’ congresses and the largest general strike in Cuban history. He argues that these efforts helped clinch the victory of the revolution, and thus presents a fresh and provocative take on the place of the working class in Cuban history.
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STEVE CUSHION is a retired university lecturer with a Ph.D. in Caribbean Labor History who lives in the East End of London. For twenty years, he worked as a bus driver in London, and has been an active socialist and trade unionist all his adult life. He is currently adviser to the Museum of Labor History on the digitization of their archives.
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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.
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