Читать книгу A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution - Stephen Cushion - Страница 10

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 industry, such as rum and soft drinks, also required the availability of sugar as a raw material. The other major traditional industry, tobacco, had declined considerably, with exports down from 256 million cigars per year in 1906 to only 21 million in 1949, whereas cigarette imports had risen from 1.7 million packs in 1935 to 15.6 million in 1949.¹⁴ The major utilities, telephones and electricity, were monopolies owned by U.S. capital. The large profits that these companies made in return for a poor service and how little of those profits were reinvested in Cuba had long been subject to criticism in the national press.¹⁵ There were small textile and shoe industries, but these could not even supply internal needs. The position of the textile industry was made worse by the 1954 commercial treaty with Japan that allowed the Japanese to export cheap clothing to Cuba in return for a guaranteed import of Cuban sugar.¹⁶ This deal provides another clear example of the dominant political influence of the sugar oligarchy. The non-sugar manufacturing bourgeoisie was organized in the Asociación Nacional de Industriales de Cuba (ANIC, National Association of Cuban Industrialists), but it did not have sufficient political weight to push the government toward protectionist tariffs and industrial development policies, which were opposed by the Asociación Nacional de Hacendados de Cuba (ANHC, National Association of Cuban Landowners) representing the interests of the sugar oligarchy. A further complication that reduced the ANIC’s ability to promote industrial development was the presence in its leadership of local representatives of U.S. business interests, most notably Colgate-Palmolive and Firestone tires, which had factories on the island. The parent companies of these U.S.-owned manufacturers had profitable links with the Cuban sugar industry. Nor was the Cuban non-sugar bourgeoisie itself independent of U.S. capital; however, they were linked more closely with U.S. finance capital, and the sugar oligarchy was linked to U.S. exporters of consumer goods. Although these factors meant that the manufacturing sector was unsuccessful in its attempts to pressure the government to adopt an effective industrial development policy, the ANIC and the ANHC were united in a belief that salary reductions were essential to make Cuban exports competitive.¹⁷ Another source of disagreement between the two associations was the corruption endemic in Cuban political and economic life. ANIC members were largely excluded from this source of income and therefore protested loudly.¹⁸

A significant proportion of Cubans whose employment was not directly or indirectly involved with sugar worked in the top-heavy state bureaucracy, the service sector, or tourism. All three sectors were riddled with corruption, particularly in the case of tourism, which Enrique Cirules’s El imperio de La Habana shows was heavily influenced by the U.S. Mafia.¹⁹ Nearly all the government intervention aimed at developing the economy was directed to unproductive capital products, mainly in Havana, that did little or nothing to aid diversification.

With this high level of dependence on sugar, any change in either the price received for the sugar crop or the amount that could be sold had a huge effect on the island’s economy. Therefore, when the political threat of a reduction in the amount purchased by the United States coincided with a heavy fall in the price on the world market, the Cuban economy as a whole faced a crisis.

The International Sugar Market

Although Cuba originally produced almost exclusively for U.S. consumption, the growth of internal production of both beet and cane sugar in the United States had caused the American government to increase import tariffs, thereby causing the Cuban share of the U.S. market to decline as the price of Cuban sugar rose for U.S. consumers.²⁰ This in turn led Cuba to look elsewhere, and by the 1950s about half of the Cuban harvest was aimed at the rest of the world, so that the income from the “world market” developed a considerable significance in the island’s economic affairs.²¹ The heightened international tension at the time of the Korean War led to stockpiling of sugar, then considered an important strategic foodstuff, leading to considerable price inflation, so that from December 1951 when the world price of sugar was 4.84 cents a pound, it climbed to a brief high of 5.42 cents the following March.²² This high price encouraged a vast increase in worldwide production, with new areas being turned over to both cane and beet farming, but, as there was not a comparable increase in consumption, the resulting crisis of overproduction led, within a year, to a collapse in the price to a mere 3.55 cents a pound.²³ At this time Cuba was producing 18 percent of the world total and thus the collapse in the market was disastrous for its economy. Cuban sugar farmers played their part in the general international scramble to grow more sugar and the 1952 zafra (sugar harvest) was the biggest in the island’s history at over 7 million tons, compared to the previous record of 5.5 million tons the year before. Unfortunately for the Cuban producers, however, of that 7 million tons they were only able to sell 4.8 million, producing a general economic crisis for the entire island.²⁴

In an attempt to cope with the immediate problems of the sugar industry, the government purchased 1.75 million tons of the 1952 zafra to be kept in reserve and off the open market, thus hoping to use Cuba’s dominant position in the market to stabilize the price. Compensation was paid to the owners for this measure, which resulted in a budget deficit of $82.6 million.²⁵ The Cuban unilateral cutback in production was implemented by decree number 78, which ruled that the 1953 harvest would be restricted to 5 million tons by shortening the length of time in which cane could be cut.²⁶ The tactic of restricting the length of the sugar harvest was designed to increase profits for the owners of the sugar companies at the expense of their employees. The sugar workers were paid only during the actual cane-cutting period, and therefore if the harvest were of shorter duration the wage bill would be reduced. Should the restriction be successful in raising or at least stabilizing the price of sugar, this would maintain or increase the employers’ income, or at least mitigate the fall in profit. Critics of the strategy of restricting production were clear at the time that only the sugar bourgeoisie could benefit from the policy of restriction, and it was widely portrayed as being against the national interest.²⁷ This illustrates the contradictions inherent in “economic nationalist” politics when the nation is divided into classes with divergent interests, and, in consequence, there is no single “national interest.”

As many of its critics predicted, this unilateral action was a complete failure, as other producing countries took advantage of Cuba’s voluntary restriction to increase their output, and the price continued to fall. The total national income from sugar fell from $655.5 million in 1952 to $404.9 million in 1953, and the total wage bill for the industry fell from $411.5 million to $253.9 million.²⁸ Moreover, speculation, insider trading, and corruption were rampant, with those who ran the Instituto Cubano de Estabilización de Azúcar (ICEA, Cuban Institute of Sugar Stabilization) enriching themselves scandalously.²⁹ The reduction in national sugar production was implemented by issuing production quotas to Cuban sugar companies, which were then able to trade these to their own immediate enrichment, while their employees faced being let go when their employer sold their quota. An example of this is the 1956 protest at the closure of central La Vizcaya in Matanzas when its quota went to La Chaparra in Oriente.³⁰ The UK government also profited from the unusually low price of sugar to end sugar rationing at home and buy a million extra tons from Cuba at less than 3 cents a pound.

Following the failure of Cuba’s unilateral action to arrest the decline in the world price of sugar, an attempt was made to organize an international agreement to regulate the market. This approach had been tried before in the 1930s with the Chadbourne Plan, which had not been particularly successful because other countries, not members of the scheme, simply increased their production and undermined the scheme.³¹ In 1953, however, forty-four governments were present at the negotiations, and the Cuban government, one of the most enthusiastic backers of the approach, had greater hopes that the sugar price on the world market might be stabilized.

The chaotic situation in the world sugar market prompted the intervention of the United Nations. In April 1953, the UN invited seventy-eight countries to send representatives to an International Sugar Conference in London, to take place in July of that year, with the intention of negotiating an International Sugar Agreement. The idea behind the agreement was to stabilize the price of sugar by allocating quotas to the different producing countries that would, in the words of the agreement, “regulate the world sugar market and reach an equilibrium between supply and demand that would allow the price to be maintained between the limits of 3.25 and 4.35 cents per pound.”³² The Cuban quota was designed to allow a zafra of 5 million tons. In the event of the price falling below 3.25 cents, quotas would be progressively cut by a maximum of 20 percent, and when that occurred no further action was envisaged. The final agreement was signed in August by only thirty-eight of the forty-four participating countries, while the rest of the sugar-producing world, particularly Peru, Indonesia, Brazil, Formosa, and East Germany (an important sugar beet producer), was not bound by the treaty.³³ Not signing the agreement and increasing production was only an option for smaller producers whose economies were not so dependent on sugar. This may have been short sighted, but it represented an opportunity for growers in these smaller producing countries to gain an income they had not previously enjoyed. If Cuba were to have tried this approach, such was its importance in the world market that its withdrawal would have destroyed the agreement.

The partial nature of the International Sugar Agreement was to be its undoing, because those countries that did not sign the agreement could increase their production as much as they wished, while importing countries who were signatories were not obliged to buy exclusively from other member states. Furthermore, the agreement only restricted production in exporting countries and did not restrict internal production in participating importing countries, a particularly important loophole for European sugar beet producers. There were also two other important sugar regulation arrangements, the Commonwealth Preference and the United States’ sugar quota schemes. The latter accounted for about half the Cuban production and would have an important effect on the situation as U.S. growers, eager to increase their own share of the domestic market, succeeded in their campaign to reduce the amount of sugar purchased from Cuba. This exacerbated the problem caused by the reduction in income from the rest of the world market. The Commonwealth scheme, designed to develop sugar production in the British Empire and guaranteeing an annual 2.5 million tons to Britain’s colonies and ex-colonies, was an additional complication because it further reduced the potential market for Cuba.³⁴ Thus Cuba faced an unfortunate conjuncture, as falling prices due to overproduction coincided with a reduction in the American and British markets, where preference was given to internal U.S. and British Empire production. Meanwhile, some smaller producing countries took short-term advantage of the London Sugar Agreement’s attempt to reduce the amount of sugar on the market and undermined the agreement by increasing their own production.

These defects were obvious from the beginning as the price dropped to 3.14 cents in November 1953, thus triggering a 15 percent drop in quotas as soon as the agreement came into force. The price continued to fall, and in May 1954 another 5 percent cut in quotas was decreed by the International Sugar Council, which had been set up under the agreement to manage the quota system. This intervention had little effect; in June, the price fell to 3.05 cents. The maximum cut in quota now having been reached, the agreement was powerless to act further, although the council did suggest a further voluntary cut.³⁵

The failure of the London Sugar Agreement to achieve its objective of stabilizing the world market sugar price between 3.25 cents and 4.35 cents per pound was to have serious political repercussions in Cuba, where opponents of the regime, like the economist Oscar Pino Santos who wrote for the journal Carteles, criticized the agreement as an unpatriotic betrayal of Cuban national interests, which he predicted was doomed to failure in any case.³⁶ It is difficult to see how anything the government might have done would have stopped the fall in the price of sugar, but the fact that they tried and failed left them open to criticism. The critics’ recommended approach, which amounted to little more than aggressively trying to sell more sugar on an unregulated market, risked a further catastrophic fall in the world price that could have bankrupted the country. Nevertheless, the fact that the weight of the measures adopted fell most heavily on the workers was to produce a strong reaction within the trade unions, a reaction exacerbated by changes in U.S. sugar-purchasing policy.

The United States had never been part of the international sugar market, having sufficient supplies from its own internal sources and client states such as Cuba and the Philippines. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Cuba supplied almost the entire U.S. market and then sold any excess on the world market, but the Jones-Costigan Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in May 1934, imposed a system of quotas that were not mutually negotiated but decided unilaterally by the U.S. secretary of agriculture.³⁷ This reduced the Cuban share of the U.S. market from 50 percent to 30 percent, and by the early 1950s the United States was buying only about half of the Cuban sugar crop. The U.S. quota system was further complicated by the fact that besides its commercial function it had a political dimension.³⁸ So, in May 1955, following an aggressive campaign led by Senator Allan Elender, the U.S. Senate passed a new “Sugar Law” that reduced Cuba’s previously held right to 96 percent of any increase in U.S. consumption to 29.5 percent. This, according to Oscar Pino-Santos writing at the time, cost Cuba nearly 100,000 tons.³⁹ This additional threat to Cuban sugar production, which occurred despite a visit to Washington by a united delegation of Cuban employers and workers’ leaders of all factions, served to increase anti-imperialist feeling among sugar workers.⁴⁰

These feelings reinforced working-class nationalist politics and gave added credence to ideas of economic nationalism as a solution to poverty and insecurity. This in turn further undermined the credibility of the London Sugar Agreement, which was popularly seen as being a surrender to foreign interests.⁴¹ It has been common since the 1960s to assume that opposition to foreign ownership was directed entirely against the United States. However, it should be remembered that European capital held a significant minority stake in the Cuban economy, and this was just as bitterly resented when it appeared to threaten the perceived Cuban national interest.

As the failure of the London Sugar Agreement to prevent the continuing decline in sugar prices was becoming increasingly obvious, the Cuban government’s inability to think of an alternative strategy further reduced its standing. Peru and Indonesia had refused to join; Brazil and Formosa were unsatisfied with their quota and left; and many importers were never included. Moreover, the British Commonwealth received privileges that, given that London was the home of the agreement, served to further weaken the agreement’s credibility. By early 1955, the price of sugar was 3.15 cents a pound, 10 points lower than the agreed minimum. Cuba appeared to be taking the majority of the restriction with a 30 percent reduction compared to the production levels of 1952, although the impact of that would be much worse if the U.S. quota were to be cut further, as now seemed likely. The London Sugar Agreement appears from these figures to be working against Cuba’s interests, but remaining a party to the agreement maintained a level of profitability for the employers, even if this was at the expense of working-class employment and living standards. But living standards for agricultural workers were already appalling.⁴² The figures contained in the 1957 report by a Cuban Jesuit association, the Agrupación Católica Universitaria, are graphic: 64 percent of rural dwellers with no proper sanitation, 43 percent illiterate, 91 percent undernourished—to give but a few examples.⁴³ Cuba’s sugar workers therefore had little to lose by resisting, and though hardship does not necessarily generate militancy, when combined with a sense of injustice there is potential for industrial action.

These problems had already been foreseen by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) in 1951 when, following the request of the Cuban government for a loan, an American economist, Francis Truslow, was commissioned to produce a report on the state of the Cuban economy.

Productivity and Politics

The Truslow Report started from the position that international competition gave rise to the need to reduce sugar production costs and the recognition that mechanization must inevitably displace some labor. The problem was summed up as:

• employees strongly resist mechanization and cost-cutting methods;

• the discharge of employees for legitimate cause [is] made difficult or impossible;

• higher wages, coupled with opposition to methods for increasing productivity, endanger the competitive position of the basic sugar industry itself.⁴⁴

The opposition to productivity measures was rooted in the island’s high levels of unemployment and underemployment, which explains the tenacity shown by Cuban workers in defending their jobs and the social clauses in the Cuban constitution that helped them to do so. The report recognizes that the high level of unemployment deeply affected the consciousness of those in work; job security was always an important concern of unionized workers.⁴⁵ Truslow sums up the situation as follows: “In Cuba it is usually easier, quicker and cheaper to divorce a wife than to fire a worker. Under prevailing conditions of chronic seasonal unemployment, it may also be easier to find a new wife than to find a new job.”⁴⁶

The report argued that increased productivity would attract investment, promote diversification, and thereby produce jobs, although it does recognize that the workers’ reluctance to cooperate was based on their doubt that the money saved would be invested productively.⁴⁷ Underneath the call for greater cooperation between management and labor lay the concrete proposal to make dismissal of employees simpler, faster, and cheaper.⁴⁸ In the particular case of the sugar industry, the report called for mechanization, not of the planting and cultivating, but of the harvesting, which was the most labor-intensive part of production and would result in the redundancy of a very large number of workers.⁴⁹ The employers wished to extend the mechanization of the sugar industry beyond that recommended by Truslow to include modernization of the refining process in order to process the cane faster. This would not only save time and thereby reduce wages in the sugar refineries, it would also put pressure on the independent cane farmers, the colonos, to increase the pace of work of their harvesting crews to supply the same amount of cane in a shorter time. The sugar workers called this process intensivismo, replying with the demand that they be paid for superproducción; this expression meant that they wished to be paid the same total amount as they had been before the new machinery arrived.⁵⁰ Clearly this was not what the employers had in mind when they considered investing in new machinery.⁵¹

The Truslow Report was not merely concerned with the production of sugar, but also examined transport, which was an equally important part of the export procedure. The railway industry was close to bankruptcy and port labor was considered to be in need of reform to reduce its potential to disrupt loading. The report bemoans “the strategic position occupied by men who load and unload ships, in view of the big investment tied up in ships and merchandise, and the ease with which shipping companies can be subjected to important losses by sudden stoppages or delays.”⁵²

This “strategic position” has been used by dockers everywhere to enhance their wages, improve their working conditions, and maintain their manning levels. However, most employers would agree with Truslow in feeling that this obliged them to employ more workers than was strictly necessary, thereby reducing business efficiency. In particular, the report identified the main problem as the refusal to bulk-load sugar. The universal nature of maritime productivity disputes is underlined by the contacts established at this time between the dockworkers of Caibarién in northern Cuba, who were fighting bulk-loading and the workers in the port of Liverpool in England, who were in dispute over attempts to introduce the fork-lift truck.⁵³ The report further believed that wage levels were excessive, a factor that also exacerbated the precarious financial state of the railway industry: “With labor still making wage demands, it is believed that in many cases they have reached the limit that employers will tolerate.”⁵⁴

It should be noted that there is little mention of the question of inflation in the discussion of wage levels. In part this is as a result of the lack of reliable data. The U.S. embassy, noting that it was “impossible to do more than conjecture as to the actual expenditure of the working classes,” concludes from their own observations that there was a considerable increase in the cost of living as a result of food price inflation.⁵⁵ This would have been another factor in stiffening labor resistance to wage cuts. Thus increased productivity was to be achieved by mechanization and longer hours of work, both policies that would reduce the need for the existing number of workers in circumstances of a chronically high level of unemployment and at a time when real wages were in any case falling as a result of food price inflation. To this was added the proposal for a cut or at least a freeze in money wages. There was therefore little prospect of workers voting for a party that intended to implement the Truslow Report.

In this context, the outlook for the 1952 general election looked unfavorable to the employers. Of the three candidates for president, Roberto Agramonte for the Ortodoxos, the recently founded anti-corruption party, was widely expected to beat rivals Fulgencio Batista, who had headed an earlier regime in the 1930s, and Carlos Hevia for the Auténticos, the current ruling party. The Ortodoxos were not a workers’ party, but were relying on working-class votes for their expected victory. The main plank of their election platform was opposition to corruption allied to a vaguely expressed economic nationalism, which called for recovery of national wealth and promised to implement measures of social equality. Such was the popular revulsion with the level of corruption of the Auténtico administration that it was widely expected that the Ortodoxos were going to win the election handsomely, and that Batista seemed to be heading for a crushing defeat.⁵⁶ The Ortodoxos displayed no interest in implementing the Truslow Report and its concerns with productivity received no mention in their public statements. The Ortodoxos’ platform spoke of the “Cubanization” of the economy, emancipating Cuba from foreign imperialism, nationalization of foreign-owned service industries and monopolies, and redistribution of arable land.⁵⁷ A study of U.S. diplomatic correspondence shows that this platform worried U.S. business interests and their allies among the Cuban bourgeoisie.⁵⁸ Eduardo Chibas, leader of the Ortodoxos until his suicide in 1951, would certainly have worried the First National Bank of Boston, which led a syndicate that loaned the Cuban government $200 million to build such projects as the tunnel under Havana Bay.⁵⁹ Chibas made it clear that if he was elected he would not repay the loan.⁶⁰

When Batista and his associates in the armed forces staged a coup on March 10, 1952, it was quickly welcomed by the United States. There was in fact remarkably little internal opposition to the army takeover, such was the cynicism with politicians in general that developed over the first fifty years of the republic. The only social group to react strongly was the students.⁶¹ The ousted president went quietly, partly for fear that an Ortodoxo election victory might have investigated and punished his corruption. Indeed, at the time some saw the main target of the coup as being the Ortodoxos rather than Carlos Prío.⁶² There was then an unseemly scramble by the majority of professional politicians to reach an accommodation with the de facto government in the hope of retaining their lucrative privileges.⁶³ There are a variety of explanations for the success of the coup: the restoration of order, the corruption and inefficiency of the Auténticos, the desire of U.S. economic interests to restructure the Cuban economy, and the Cold War anti-communism of the U.S. government.⁶⁴ These factors all played a part, and it is not the intention here to propose a monocausal explanation. Nevertheless, given the lack of importance accorded elsewhere to the support given by business interests for the specifically anti-labor role played by the dictatorship, that particular aspect will be stressed, not with the intention of downplaying the importance of other factors, but of redressing the balance and bringing forward a neglected aspect of the history of the period.

The coup was, indeed, generally welcomed by capitalist interests, as it was felt that Batista would be more business-friendly than the alternatives. Within ten days of the coup, the major business associations had visited the presidential palace to offer their support: the Asociación de Hacendados, the Asociación de Bancos de Cuba, the Asociación Nacional de Comisionistas del Comercio Exterior, the Socios de la Bolsa de la Habana, the Asociación de Industriales de Cuba, and the Cámara de Comercio.⁶⁵ Meanwhile, the main pro-business daily paper, Diario de la Marina, which had supported Batista’s election campaign enthusiastically,⁶⁶ contrasted the situation under the previous government, in which the “balance inclined monstrously toward the labor unions,” with the statements of the new government, which were described as “serene and reasonable.”⁶⁷

In May 1952, the British ambassador wrote: “I am more and more convinced that the basic reason for the Armed Forces having staged the revolution was their utter disgust at the growing and unrestrained power of Labor.”⁶⁸ Later that year he added: “The business community, industry and commerce have all welcomed the new regime.… If the coup d’état had to come, no better leader could in their view have been found and no more opportune moment chosen.”⁶⁹

The U.S. ambassador equally noted that businessmen were among the new regime’s most enthusiastic supporters.⁷⁰ The role of the state as ultimate guarantor of the interests of the ruling class was to be clearly demonstrated in the period under Batista’s rule.

A Business-Friendly Coup

Attempting to influence the international market price of sugar was an important policy objective for the Cuban government, and the sheer size of the country’s production seemed to offer the possibility of success in manipulating the market to maintain price levels. The government’s attempts to achieve this, first by a unilateral cut in exports and then through participation in the International Sugar Agreement, ended in failure as the price of sugar continued to fall. This fall made the question of labor productivity more urgent. The level of profitability was a serious problem for nearly all sectors of the Cuban economy by the middle of the twentieth century, even without the fall in the world price of sugar. The Truslow Report identified the principal challenge facing the Cuban economy as low labor productivity, and the task of resolving this problem would be made much more difficult if the still-dominant sugar industry ceased to be profitable. To achieve this general increase in productivity, wages would have to fall and manning levels would have to be cut, and that in turn would require state action. The report foresaw that a dictatorship might result from this conflict of class interest.⁷¹ Given the fear of most workers that the productivity measures proposed would be detrimental to their income and employment prospects, many employers thought that an authoritarian regime would be necessary to enforce the Truslow Report’s proposals that, at least in the short-term, could only result in a considerable increase in the already chronic level of unemployment.

One of the reasons for the success of the coup of March 10, 1952, was support from the business community for a regime that could reduce the ability of Cuban workers to defend their wages and working conditions. Such a regime could push the balance of national income in favor of the employers. The new government sought to reduce opposition from organized labor by incorporating and corrupting the trade union bureaucracy, which would operate with the support of the Ministry of Labor and the police if necessary. Should that be unsuccessful, the regime had the army at its disposal to enforce its priorities. The year 1955 would bring this conflict to the fore.