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1. ORGANIZED LABOR IN THE 1950s

In the early 1950s, the Cuban trade union federation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC, Cuban Workers’ Confederation), headed by General Secretary Eusebio Mujal, was widely seen as corrupt and undemocratic. It had not always been like this, but the Cold War attack on organized labor, which affected the whole of the Americas, north and south, was particularly successful in Cuba. Following the 1947 CTC Congress, the communists had been removed from their previous position of leadership and replaced by a new bureaucracy that seemed more interested in enhancing their own comfortable existence than in defending workers’ wages and conditions. However, the actions of the trade union leadership cannot be explained solely by corrupt practices but must be understood in relation to analysis of their politics, which prevented them from seeing beyond the parameters set by the capitalist system. In the difficult economic circumstances facing postwar Cuba, the CTC leadership was prepared to restrict the demands they put forward on behalf of their members to the employers’ “ability to pay.” But though the leadership accepted that trade union demands had to be “affordable” and “realistic,” growing numbers of Cuban workers did not see it that way. This resulted in tensions within the unions between the rank and file and the bureaucracy, which led militant Cuban workers to build unofficial structures in order to defend their interests.¹

Nevertheless, trade unions are never monolithic, relying on voluntary officials such as shop stewards and branch secretaries to maintain local organization. There is therefore nearly always a space in which militants can organize to counteract the domination of the bureaucracy. During the crisis in which Cuba found itself during the 1950s, there was still a lively independent milieu within the labor movement at the local level, where the authority of the CTC bureaucracy was contested and became a battleground between the various currents competing for influence within the working class.

Historical Background

The organized labor movement in Cuba dates back to the guilds and craft unions of the nineteenth century, but the first nationwide trade union federation, the Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba (CNOC, Cuban National Labor Confederation), was not founded until 1925. In the same year, Gerardo Machado was democratically elected president, but his regime became increasingly repressive as the effects of the economic crisis of the late 1920s raised the temperature of the class struggle. Cuba’s sugar-based economy was already suffering from reductions in U.S. purchases as a result of political pressure from mainland producers, with the result that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had a particularly devastating effect on the island.²

The situation came to a head in 1933 when a strike by Havana bus drivers developed into a general strike that, in conjunction with a rebellion by students and an army mutiny led by Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, brought down the government. It is worth noting that the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), which had progressively gained control of the CNOC toward the end of the 1920s, tried unsuccessfully to call off the strike in return for minor concessions from the Machado government, and this may be seen as confirmation of the politically moderating effect of having control of a trade union apparatus. The government of Ramón Grau San Martín, which took office after the uprising, proved to be neither capable of satisfying the aspirations of the workers nor being able to bring them under control. The state of dual power that resulted from this contradiction was brought to a close by Batista, who, working closely with the U.S. ambassador, used his control of the army to defeat a general strike in 1935. Initially ruling through puppet presidents, Batista imposed a regime that has been described as both co-optive and repressive, a model that operated by combining a mixture of nationalist demagogy and minor social reforms with repression of any attempt by workers to exceed the boundaries established by the government.³

The CNOC did not recover from the defeat of the 1935 general strike, while the PCC, itself considerably weakened by police repression, reached an understanding with Batista whereby, in return for legalization, they worked to broaden its narrow social base. One of the outcomes of this arrangement was the replacement of the CNOC by a new organization, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, which was, from the outset, a state-sponsored trade union. A low level of subscription payment led to dependency on the state, a dependency that was increased by the CTC’s approach to defending its members’ interests, which mainly depended on the leadership’s relationship with the Ministry of Labor, rather than industrial action or collective bargaining.⁴ This relationship left the CTC leadership vulnerable to a change of government.

Batista finally tired of indirect rule and, in 1940, with the support of the communists, won the first honest general election in Cuban history. The PCC, now renamed the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), under the influence of Moscow, declared a class truce during the Second World War, which resulted in a wage freeze and no-strike deal. This reduced its credibility among the general CTC membership, the majority of whom were more interested in their material conditions than in the war in Europe. Thus, when Batista’s chosen successor stood for election with PSP support in 1944, he was defeated by Grau San Martín and his Auténtico Party.⁵ The communists’ wartime “non-political” approach made them superfluous, while their trade union practice, a combination of undemocratic bureaucratic control and a reliance on government patronage, left them in a weak position. The logic of dependence on a relationship with the state is that with the arrival of a new government other factions could offer a closer relationship and thereby gain popular support. The Comisión Obrera Nacional Auténtica (CONA, National Labor Commission of the Auténtico Party) led by Eusebio Mujal and linked to the ruling Auténtico Party, did just this. Throughout the spring of 1947, the Auténticos made gains in the sugar and port workers’ unions, while some PSP officials defected to CONA.

There were some armed skirmishes between members of the PSP and the CONA in 1944–45, but matters came to a head at the 5th CTC Congress in 1947 when, following a violent dispute over credentials, the Minister of Labor, Carlos Prío, suspended the congress and then used the powers of his ministry to give control of the federation to the CONA, although initially the general secretary was an independent, an official of the electrical workers’ union named Angel Cofiño. The PSP did not have sufficient active support to prevent the takeover of the CTC and an attempted general strike called by the displaced communist leadership failed, with only the Havana dockworkers and tram drivers coming out in support. In areas where government intervention proved insufficient to impose a new leadership, gangsters linked to the Auténticos used violence to enforce the change of officials. This included the murder of three of the most respected communist workers’ leaders, the dockworker Aracelio Iglesias, the cigar-roller Miguel Fernández Roig, and the sugar worker, Jésus Menéndez.⁶ An attempt to form a communist-controlled breakaway federation failed when a new law required a union to be affiliated to the official federation before it could sign a collective agreement and this led many previously PSP-led unions to reenter the official CTC controlled by the Auténticos in order to preserve their legal status.⁷

Thereafter, Mujal, who quickly succeeded Cofiño as general secretary, used his links to Carlos Prío, who was elected president in 1948, to secure enough economic gains for his members to maintain his position and to prove that his grouping, referred to as mujalistas, were at least as effective as the communists they had replaced.⁸ Thus, in 1950, a Havana tram strike, led by communists, was defeated by police repression, while bank workers were granted their demands on condition that they affiliate with the CTC(A). Reports from the British ambassador in 1952 are full of criticism of the “endless irresponsible demands of the labor movement,” which he blamed on Mujal, who “imposed his will on President Prío and secured satisfaction for his every whim, however irresponsible and prejudicial to the long term interests of the country it might be.” The U.S. embassy made similar complaints; they used more moderate language, but their frustration with the strength of organized labor comes through just as clearly.⁹

Cuba in the 1950s had the highest percentage of unionized workers in Latin America (see Table 1.1).¹⁰ The Cuban labor movement was organized in a single confederation, the CTC, which had a membership of over one million workers out of a total national population of six million. This membership was divided into industrial federations with the sugar workers’ federation, the FNTA, accounting for half the membership. These federations were in turn divided into local unions covering either a geographical area or a single employer depending on the structure of the industry. There were also provincial and city-wide confederations of all of the CTC unions in the area covered. The Cuban trade union movement was highly centralized, with the CTC leadership claiming and exerting authority over the individual federations. By the mid-1950s, this centralized control was exerted with the support of the Ministry of Labor, backed up by the police where necessary. The removal of the communists from office may have suited the Cold War foreign policy objectives of the U.S. government, but did little in itself to improve the productivity of Cuban workers. This would require a more structural weakening of their industrial organization.

TABLE 1.1: CTC Membership

Industrial Federation	Membership
Sugar	550,000
Tobacco	98,000
Transport	80,000
Construction	75,000
Commerce	65,000
Textiles	50,000
Maritime	35,000
Food Processing	32,000
Petroleum	27,000
Railways	25,000
Cattle Farming	22,000
Flour Processing	20,000
Shoes	19,000
Medicine	19,000
Gastronomy	16,800
Metallurgy	16,000
Barbers	15,000
Beverages	12,000
Printing	10,000
Furniture	8,500
Electric, Gas, Water	7,300
Cinema	5,200
Insurance	5,200
Banking	4,000
Shows	4,000
Musicians	4,000
Salesmen	4,000
Telephone	3,500
Aviation	2,000
Medical Sales	2,000
Telegraph	600
TOTAL	1,237,100

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, but for them to do so requires a firm political position, which is normally only possible when they have considerable support and/or pressure from below.

It might be thought that the formation of a national confederation of unions, such as the Cuban CTC, would give the officials a more universalist approach and highlight the common interests of the working class. Indeed, this has always been the justification for forming such national federations. However, the leaders of a national federation form another bureaucracy that sits on top of the bureaucratic layer that already exists in the federating unions. Rank-and-file pressure on the national federation leaders is mediated by that intermediate layer. As a result, national federations tend to be more conservative than their component parts. The fact that they are balancing between two social classes allows a certain room for maneuvering, and this partial independence presents the bureaucracy with the possibility of working for their own interests.

In the case of the Cuban Republic, this self-interest expressed itself in the form of a level of corruption on a par with the corrupt nature of society as a whole, and the CTC general secretary, Eusebio Mujal, was no exception. Not content with his salary of $280,000 a year, he was susceptible to manipulation by a government prepared to use public finances to corruptly advance its policies. Mujal and his associates therefore became an important prop of the dictatorship. The role they played arose from a combination of factors, with the position of the trade union bureaucracy in capitalist society and the corrupt nature of the individuals concerned becoming pressures that were pushing in the same direction. Most writers on the period speak of the evident corruption of the leadership of the CTC, but the idea that this merely reinforced the tendency toward caution and compromise inherent in trade union bureaucracy is normally neglected.²²

Mujal’s arguments had a logic and were not incompatible with the economic nationalist politics that dominated working-class political discussion, on condition that the necessity of operating within the prevailing economic and political system was accepted. Thus he was able to report to a May Day meeting in 1952 that he had called off the March 10th strike against the coup in return for Batista’s guarantee of workers’ rights and the confirmation of existing trade union officials.²³ He argued for the trade unions to stay out of politics and claimed that his friendly relationship with Batista was merely pragmatic and was the best way to advance workers’ interests, thereby avoiding any discussion of the nature of the regime.²⁴ He constantly spoke of increasing productivity to help create new jobs and argued that it was true solidarity for those workers in employment to make sacrifices to help create jobs for the unemployed: “Anyone who does not cooperate in promoting the prosperity of the nation is a traitor to Cuba. The workers’ movement is inclined to reach agreements and compromises which lead to more work and greater production.”²⁵

A typical example of the mujalista method was Mujal’s relationship with the trade union organization in the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay. In 1950, the trade union for the base workers was set up jointly by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CTC as a moderate, bureaucratic, anti-communist organization with a no-strike policy, membership of which was confined to permanent staff, thereby excluding the daily-paid contract workers and potentially establishing the permanent employees as a sort of labor aristocracy. U.S. Navy authorities were reluctant to recognize the union at first, but following the establishment of the Batista dictatorship in 1952 and under pressure from the State Department via Romualdi, saw that a moderate organization that could channel workers’ resentments along harmless paths would be to their advantage. Mujal initially threatened to mobilize the whole Cuban labor movement in support of the base workers’ union if it were not recognized, but, as soon as he obtained this recognition, he ensured that the union was run by moderate men, confining themselves to occasional nationalistic rhetorical outbursts, while practically achieving little to improve the material conditions of the membership. When even this rhetoric proved too much for the base commander in 1954, Mujal “intervened” and called fraudulent union elections to ensure that his own people organized matters without troubling the employer.²⁶

The CTC in the 1950s did manage to prevent some of the employers’ worst excesses, but if a trade union accepts the principles of capitalism, then during an economic crisis, if the employer really cannot afford to pay, the reformist trade union leader has no choice but to accept a cut in his members’ wages. This is of course easier for the trade union bureaucrat to accept as he does not himself have to lose money. In the world economic situation of the 1950s, particularly given the falling world price of sugar, Cuban capitalism could neither afford to pay the existing level of wages nor maintain manning levels as they were. So, opposition to productivity increases required a revolutionary perspective at odds with the normally cautious attitude of most full-time trade union officials. Such a revolutionary perspective had its deepest roots in Oriente Province, particularly in the town of Guantánamo, which, ironically, was also Eusebio Mujal’s hometown. It was in Oriente that Cuban anti-imperialism found its strongest base.

Nationalism

Some sections of the Cuban manufacturing bourgeoisie were attracted to ideas of economic nationalism such as protective tariffs and import substitution, but they were hampered in their campaign for such measures by two main factors. Firstly, there was considerable intermingling of commercial and manufacturing capital, which caused a conflict of interest because commercial capital was strongly attached to the link with the United States.²⁷ Secondly, both national and foreign manufacturing capital suffered from the same problems of low productivity, and this would push many Cuban employers into an alliance of self-interest with American capitalism.

At a Conference for the Advancement of the National Economy in 1947, Cuban industrialists called for higher productivity and for easier dismissal of unwanted employees, linking this with measures to attract foreign capital. There was also a trend toward the merger of foreign and national capital in joint ventures, thereby increasing the convergence of interests between the Cuban industrial bourgeoisie and U.S. capitalism as foreign investment increased in the hope of larger profit margins.²⁸ This structural integration led to a lessening of nationalist sentiment among Cuban industrialists that was not reflected in working-class attitudes.

Although the integration of U.S. and Cuban capital resulted in a more positive view of the United States among the elite, the attitudes of working-class people, who often bore the brunt of U.S. economic domination, became more hostile. Charles Page comments: “For years, the Cuban workers’ bloodiest strikes were against the intransigence of certain American enterprises.”²⁹

This close relationship between U.S. and Cuban capital could inflame nationalist passions when that relationship seemed to the detriment of other classes. An example of this is the Canal Vía Cuba. This was an American project to build a canal that would cut across the whole island, from the Bay of Cárdenas in the north to the Bay of Pigs in the south. This elicited considerable opposition from many different sections of the community, but was most unpopular among the workers and students.³⁰ Thus the newly elected president of the university students union, the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU, Federation of University Students), José Antonio Echeverría, described it as a direct attack on the island’s sovereignty, and the railway workers of Guantánamo organized an opposition meeting jointly with the city’s student federation that attracted many of the city’s leading citizens.³¹ Carta Semanal, the Communist Party’s clandestine newspaper, called it a military project, which was designed to enable the United States to deploy its fleet and which would make Cuba a nuclear target in time of war. The paper went on to condemn the proposed canal as an 80-km-long port with lower wages and bulk loading of sugar where Cuban employment law would not apply.³² This last aspect drew the virulent opposition of the dockworkers’ union, the Federación de Obreros Marítimos Nacional (FOMN, National Federation of Maritime Workers), whose conference unanimously opposed the project, comparing it to the Panama Canal.³³ Juan Taquechel, leader of the Santiago dockers, sent a letter to all his fellow workers condemning the project in terms that combined anti-imperialism, nationalism, and anti-militarism with a promise to resist the canal’s threat to jobs and conditions.³⁴ The outcry was such that the project was quickly 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. This expansion would force the MR-26-7 to consider its relationship with the PSP, with which it would find itself in competition for influence among the militant working class.

Communism

The Cuban Communist Party was founded in 1925. In common with the other official Communist parties in Latin America, it supported a stage-by-stage approach to politics that required the establishment of a “Bourgeois-Democratic” regime before a start could be made on the road to socialism.⁵² During the early 1930s, the Cuban Communists attempted a sectarian implementation of this policy and refused to work with other organizations that opposed the Machado dictatorship.⁵³ Nevertheless, the party increased its influence and membership by its support for workers in the sugar industry from 1930 to 1933 and thereafter played an important role in the Cuban trade union movement.⁵⁴ But the party leadership was taken by surprise when, in 1933, a stoppage by Havana bus drivers turned into a revolutionary general strike. The party tried to settle the dispute in return for concessions from the government, but when the strike continued despite these attempts at compromise and successfully brought down the Machado government, the party sacrificed much of its credibility.

After the Nazi victory in Germany, the Communist International (Comintern) became increasingly concerned by the growth of fascism and changed course, adopting the policy of calling for popular fronts, or alliances between the working class and progressive elements in the bourgeoisie. Communist parties began to speak in terms of national unity against fascism and imperialism, and minimizing the significance of the class struggle.⁵⁵ This tendency was exacerbated in Cuba as a result of the influence of the leader of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA), Earl Browder, who, in December 1943, argued that all social problems could be solved through peaceful compromise. This approach, which became known as Browderism, argued that capitalism and communism could march hand-in-hand to a future of peaceful collaboration.⁵⁶ This provided theoretical justification for the particular interpretation of the popular front policy that was adopted in Cuba, which resulted in an alliance with General Batista during his first government in the 1940s. Memory of this alliance would further reduce the party’s credibility among Batista’s opponents during his second regime in the 1950s, despite the party having repudiated Browderism in 1945 along with the rest of the world communist movement. It has become common to apportion blame for this political approach entirely to Earl Browder, but it should be recalled that Vicente Lombardo Toledano, leader of the CTAL, though not a communist, also spoke of the progressive nature of the Roosevelt administration and advocated alliances with right-wing governments as long as they were anti-Fascist. Fortunately for his historical reputation, Lombardo rejected the logic of the Cold War and denounced U.S. imperialism after the Second World War, and Browder was purged and sank into obscurity.⁵⁷

This relationship with Batista did, in fact, allow the Communist Party to claim credit for some reforms, such as the labor protection clauses in the 1940 constitution, which provided a space within which the CTC could function. It should be said that the PSP was probably the only consistently honest force in Cuban politics during the 1940s.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, their approach left the PSP dependent on its relationship with the state and, when Batista lost the election in 1944, the communists were dangerously exposed, particularly given the U.S. pressure to repress communism in the new atmosphere of the developing Cold War. They were eventually purged from the CTC leadership during 1947–48.

Therefore, the PSP could not be under any illusions that their previous good relations with Batista could be reestablished following his 1952 coup, which they immediately condemned placing the blame on U.S. imperialism.⁵⁹ They called for the setting up of a frente democrático nacional (national democratic front) with the aim of uniting the whole opposition in a popular front to resist Batista by legal means. Unfortunately for them, the Havana leadership of most of the rest of the opposition was more anti-communist than it was anti-Batista and the call fell on deaf ears.⁶⁰ This was not always the case in the provinces with, for example, the local newspaper in Santiago de Cuba publishing a joint declaration by all the political parties, including the PSP, condemning the coup.⁶¹ Generally speaking, such was the disillusion with politics felt by most Cubans that the only organized social group to actively oppose the coup were the students, with whom the PSP had little influence. Thus the party failed to see any significance in Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks.

Having been falsely accused of complicity in the Moncada attack, the PSP was included in the generally increased repression that followed the incident. Their newspaper Hoy was closed down; the party was formally banned; and the purge of the remaining communists in the CTC was intensified.⁶² In the widely circulated pamphlet entitled Carta Abierta a los Putchistas y Terroristas (Open Letter to the Putschists and Terrorists), they argued that individual action, such as the Moncada attack, disorientated the masses and gave the government an excuse for brutal repression.⁶³ There were, however, some signs of disagreement within the party, although mainly confined within the leadership. The following year, a well-known member of the National Committee of the PSP, César Vilar, who had once been general secretary of the first national trade union federation, the CNOC, and had been both a National Assembly representative and a senator, was expelled for persistently criticizing the manner in which the party handled the situation.⁶⁴

It is easy with hindsight, given the eventual victory of the MR-26-7, to think that the PSP made an avoidable political mistake in criticizing the Moncada attack. However, such an attitude does not take into account the real situation at the time. Fidel Castro was not the prominent figure he would become, and he did not have a track record of success. Indeed, there was considerable confusion as to who the actual attackers were. Juan Arauco, writing immediately after the events on behalf of the PSP in the New York Daily Worker, seemed to think that ex-president Prío was behind the attack and went on to criticize him for the loss of life and for giving the regime an excuse for repression.⁶⁵ This last point is expanded in an open letter from the PSP national committee that lists the measures taken in the aftermath of the attack. Despite the regime being well aware that the PSP was not involved, the attack provided an excuse to arrest and harass communists, to close the party’s newspaper, to impose censorship on all the opposition press, and to implement wage cuts and redundancies.⁶⁶ The footnotes of history are littered with forgotten glorious failures, and there was no way of knowing that Castro would be able to turn this apparent disaster to his immense political advantage. At the time, as far as militants in the workplaces were concerned, the attack must have seemed irrelevant to their struggle, if not positively dangerous.

By the end of 1953, the Communist Party had reorganized and adapted to underground operation in the increased repression following the Moncada attack. Its main tactic in 1954 was to appeal to the leaders of the “bourgeois opposition,” mainly through open letters published in the party’s clandestine press, for unity against the government.⁶⁷ This initiative reached its most unlikely position when they proposed, at the end of May, a Frente Democrático Nacional, which was to include progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie and would oppose the provisions of the 1951 report from the World Bank, known as the Truslow Plan. It strains credulity to think that even progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie would oppose a report that called for increased productivity. However, by July 1954 the regime’s proposed elections in the coming November gave the PSP a more concrete slogan: “Voto negativo” (negative vote), a vote against Batista.⁶⁸ The pages of Carta Semanal became increasingly dominated by this idea, while militants were urged to set up comités de voto negativo (committees for a negative vote) in their neighborhoods as the basis for a future union popular.⁶⁹ Those other oppositionists who called for abstention were roundly attacked as playing Batista’s game, while the federation of university students, the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU), was accused of “petit-bourgeois desperation.”⁷⁰ There were, however, inherent problems with this approach, not least in the naïveté displayed in believing that there was the slightest possibility that Batista would allow himself to lose the election; after all, the original coup was staged because he had no chance of winning an election honestly. This time the only opponent was Ramon Grau San Martín, who undercut the PSP’s strategy still further by withdrawing from the contest at the last minute, leaving Batista as the sole candidate, despite which his supporters still fraudulently increased his vote to a scandalous degree. Faced with this farce, the PSP national committee reassessed its position and, recognizing that there was little future in electoral politics for the foreseeable future, turned its attention to the working class.⁷¹

Under the slogan ¡Unión y Lucha, Obreros! (Workers, Unity and Struggle!), Carta Semanal would report in great detail the increased level of industrial disputes that followed the 1954 elections.⁷² The PSP’s new alignment to the working class, therefore, came at a propitious time and the November 1954 decision to set up locally based Comités de Defensa de las Demandas Obreras (CDDO, Committees for the Defense of Workers’ Demands) created a useful vehicle to intervene during 1955.⁷³ The demands in the manifesto published on the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the party, under the title of “A Democratic Solution to the Crisis,” provide a useful resumé of PSP policies at this time:

• Defend workers’ and peasants’ incomes

• Eliminate the Truslow Plan

• 80 pesos/month for the unemployed

• Agrarian reform that gradually distributes the land to the peasants

• Nationalization of foreign-owned public services

• Control of bank credit in the interests of the country

• Protection of national industry

• Unrestricted sugar harvest

• Relations with the United States on the basis of mutual respect and equality

• Diplomatic relations with the socialist countries

• Eliminate racial discrimination

• Democratic rights, independence, and peace

• Establish a National Democratic Front⁷⁴

The new approach would enable the party to develop a sufficient base in February 1956 to be able to organize a national conference to set up the Comité Nacional de Defensa de las Demandas Obreras y por la Democratización de la CTC (CNDDO, National Committee for the Defense of Workers’ Demands and for the Democratization of the CTC).⁷⁵ With their wholehearted adoption of the rhetoric of national unity and a “bread and butter” approach to their work in the trade unions, the Cuban Communist Party did not offer a socialist alternative to challenge the hegemonic nationalist politics. As a result, they remained content with tailing other, more militant nationalist currents such as the MR-26-7.⁷⁶

Thus, though there were considerable differences in the tactics that the PSP and the MR-26-7 proposed to implement their programs, there was no great difference in the basic politics behind the programs, with a shared concern for economic justice, national independence, and an end to corruption. Both groupings also sought to unite the Cuban “people,” a nebulous term that included workers, peasant farmers, the unemployed, small businessmen and professionals along with patriotic industrialists. However, while the MR-26-7’s tactics for the revolutionary overthrow of Batista centered on a general strike, they differed markedly from the PSP in stressing the need to combine that strike with an armed insurrection.⁷⁷ The importance of these tactical differences would become clear as the struggle developed.

Trade Union Bureaucracy

There is a contradiction in the nature of trade unions under capitalism. They are both hierarchical and bureaucratic, with a top-down structure, as well as being democratic, voluntary organizations whose authority comes from the base. However, there is a danger of oversimplification if we solely equate the bureaucratic side of unions with the full-time officials and the democratic side with the rank-and-file membership and their local leadership. On the one hand, the full-time apparatus of a trade union depends on the support, or at least acquiescence, of local officials such as secretaries of local unions and workplace representatives and their wider support among the general membership. On the other hand, full-time officials sometimes respond to pressure from below and lead militant action in defiance of instructions from their hierarchical superiors. Nevertheless, the tendency for the trade union bureaucracy to be cautious and conciliatory in their dealings with management and government is an important factor in all industrial disputes and one that is often neglected by many writers.

The Cuban government appeared to be in a strong position in the 1950s and was recognized as being very pro-business. The legal political opposition was weak, corrupt, incompetent, and divided, with little interest in defending workers’ wages and conditions, being composed of the traditional representatives of business interests. In any case, the de facto powers adopted by the government since the coup left little public political space in which the legal opposition could operate. The trade union movement seemed to be firmly under the control of a corrupt bureaucracy which, given that incomes were guaranteed by the compulsory deduction of subscriptions from workers’ wages, were more dependent upon their good relations with the Ministry of Labor than on the support of the ordinary union members.

The employers and their allies neglected the tradition of independent militancy. The workplace activists who would be responsible for reviving this tradition provided an alternative pole of attraction within working-class politics opposed to the mujalista bureaucracy. This milieu was not politically homogeneous with the PSP and the MR-26-7 competing for influence. However, both groups were pushing in the same direction as the competition for influence and membership would be won by the group showing that its strategy was best able to advance the workers’ cause.

When a regime becomes involved in industrial relations, the class struggle becomes overtly political, and so the government’s close relationship with the United States, which still dominated the economy, would give credence to nationalist politics among militant workers. The domination of the Cuban trade unions by a corrupt clique exacerbated the normal trend of a trade union bureaucracy to reach an accommodation with the existing regime, yet despite this radical popular nationalism provided a political base for internal opposition within the labor movement. Thus the labor movement was divided. On one side was the pro-government mujalista bureaucracy and, on the other, the anti-government forces within organized labor, principally represented by the communists and the 26th July Movement, which were in competition for political influence.

Was the Cuban working class of the 1950s capable of acting as a “class for itself” and intervening in events to assert its own interests? The Cold War offensive appeared to have been successful in Cuba. It not only removed the communists and their allies from their controlling position in the CTC, but also replaced them with new leaders who were far more focused on their own interests than those of their members. This new bureaucracy seemed firmly entrenched, having subverted the internal democratic structures of the unions and marginalized the internal opposition. Thus at first sight it would appear that those who doubt the political importance of the working class at this juncture might seem justified.

Nevertheless, by the middle of the decade, there were signs of life among militant workers who were unhappy with this state of affairs. The PSP still had a base and, having recovered some confidence following the defeats of the late 1940s, was embarking on a new approach, based on the CDDOs, which were aimed at reconnecting with organized labor. There were also other, less formal networks of militants who were working to overcome the stranglehold of the bureaucracy, and the MR-26-7 was starting to seem an attractive home for these activists.

The tension between bureaucracy and democracy becomes more obvious at times of heightened class struggle, and by the middle of 1954 the scene was set for industrial confrontation. The fall in the price of sugar and the consequent crisis of profitability made the question of raising the level of productivity crucial for the Cuban employing class. In order to achieve this, they had to reduce staffing levels and wage rates. This did not seem to present too great a problem for the employers.

However, though workers may tolerate an undemocratic and corrupt leadership of their unions when their livelihoods are not in jeopardy, they can be much less tolerant when they see their wages and working conditions in jeopardy. The increasing difficulties faced by the Cuban economy, along with the employers’ determination to maintain their profit margins at their employees’ expense seemed to call for a more robust response than the CTC leadership was prepared to organize. Thus the question of working-class action can be reformulated to ask whether rank-and-file militants were able to overcome the dead hand of the bureaucracy and organize their fellow workers to fight for their interests.