Cuba's Revolutionary World

Jonathan C. Brown

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780674978324
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time "the real Revolution" had arrived. As Jonathan Brown shows in this capacious history of the Cuban Revolution, Castro's words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world. Cuba's Revolutionary World examines in forensic detail how the turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century's most transformative events. Initially, Castro's revolution augured well for democratic reform movements gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba's economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenant Che Guevara sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection.Castro's provocations inspired intense opposition. Cuban anticommunists who had fled to Miami found a patron in the CIA, which actively supported their efforts to topple Castro's regime. The unrest fomented by Cuban-trained leftist guerrillas lent support to Latin America's military castes, who promised to restore stability. Brazil was the first to succumb to a coup in 1964; a decade later, military juntas governed most Latin American states. Thus did a revolution that had seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America bring about its tragic opposite.

PART ONE

REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION IN CUBA

CHAPTER ONE

How to Consolidate a Revolution

ALL OF CASTRO’S political maneuvers to consolidate power might have come to naught if Fulgencio Batista’s army had survived the dictator’s downfall. It did not. Batista had thoroughly destroyed the institutional integrity of the officer corps with his promotions of incompetent cronies and vicious enforcers. Police brutality provoked even more resistance from university students and alienated their middle-class families. He permitted Los Tigres of the gangster Rolando Masferrer to conduct political rallies and collaborate with American Mafiosi who built casinos and paid off the president’s political supporters.¹

Batista had pretended to be the magnanimous political manipulator, rigging elections with one hand and granting amnesty to political prisoners with the other. He publicly depreciated the capabilities of the Revolutionary Directorate in Havana and of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement in Santiago de Cuba. He doted on the children of his second wife and partied with friends and cronies in the Presidential Palace and at his rural estate, the Finca Kuquine. When Fidel got into the Sierra Maestra with some two dozen fighters in January 1957, the dictator refused to believe Castro was even alive.

In June 1958, it was already too late when the dictator finally woke up to the danger. He sent in twelve thousand poorly trained raw recruits to chase the guerrillas, now numbering three hundred, out of the Sierra Maestra, while his best units remained in their garrisons close to the big cities.² Unable to defeat Castro’s rebels, the army abandoned its arms and left the Sierra Maestra. Neither could it rout one thousand guerrillas of two armed movements operating independently of Castro in the Escambray Mountains, the Revolutionary Directorate and the Second Front. When the M26 guerrilla columns of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos marched from the east toward the center of the island, few army units dared to oppose them. Only the air force sent out warplanes and bombers, which the guerrilla columns easily avoided by traveling at night. The surrender of more than six thousand soldiers, policemen, and Masferrer’s Tigres at Santa Clara to several hundred guerrillas under Che Guevara’s combined command—along with the simultaneous fall of a second garrison to Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos—sealed the doom of the military establishment.

By January 1, 1959, the collapse of the old-regime army had been complete. The dispirited troops, some of whom had not been paid for months, welcomed the guerrillas as “brothers.” Castro’s guerrilla commanders took control of every major military installation and police station on the island, and his tribunals began to execute some six hundred “war criminals.” Batista’s supporters had killed up to three thousand victims, but not the twenty thousand claimed by the revolution’s propagandists.³ The old army no longer existed when the various revolutionary factions began to jostle for power.

¿ARMAS PARA QUÉ?

The kernel of counterrevolution germinated within the revolution itself, not among the batistianos who had just lost power. This fact accounts for Fidel Castro’s political actions following the departure of the dictator. In that first week of 1959, Castro had no intention of rushing to Cuba’s capital city. He did not need to behave like every other petty politician seeking immediate advantage. To do so would have been a sign of weakness. Exiled party politicians were catching the first Cubana and Pan Am flights to Havana’s Rancho Boyeros Airport. They had hopes of getting appointments in the interim government. Inside Cuba, army and naval officers who had been imprisoned by Batista hurried to Havana from the Isle of Pines. Guerrilla bands not affiliated to Fidel’s M26 arrived in Havana on January 2.

Not Fidel. He knew he was the man of the hour, the master of the situation. Castro’s urban militias, made up principally of young men of middle-class origins, had quickly established order in the cities. These members of the urban underground were not barbudos and did not wear verde olivo (olive-green) battle dress. The youthful militiamen announced their affiliation and authority in the streets with black-and-red M26 armbands. These urban militias prevented violence, except on January 1, when crowds in Havana looted homes of notorious batistianos and the casinos of American mobsters.⁴ Thereafter, calm and celebration prevailed.

Under Fidel’s orders, guerrilla columns of M26 barbudos took over police stations and army barracks in towns and cities all over the island. Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos and one hundred men took charge of the sprawling Camp Columbia, on the outskirts of Havana, early on the morning of January 3. He promised the ten thousand Batista troops still there that he harbored no rancor toward them, only toward their corrupt former officers.⁵ Che Guevara’s column quietly entered the capital after dark and established his headquarters at the eighteenth-century La Cabaña Fortress on the east side of the Bay of Havana. Both comandantes arrived fresh from their victories in Las Villas in caravans of commandeered army jeeps and trucks. Castro could have become a military dictator if he had wished, ruling the country like the Somozas of Nicaragua or Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. American investors, members of Congress, and even the White House would have acquiesced. But he wanted something more than ending up like another Fulgencio Batista.

The public had heard Fidel speak ever since his men had set up Radio Rebelde, a shortwave transmitter that had broadcast more trustworthy news than the government media. Since the summer of 1958, Cuban shops could not stock enough shortwave radio receivers for the public to pick up Rebel Radio.⁶ Fidel frequently spoke to the nation, as he did when he ordered the general strike against the junta of General Eulogio Cantillo of Batista’s army, but his followers wanted to see the brave barbudos in person. Fidel’s victory caravan took its time traveling toward Havana so that he could meet his people, speak to them, and celebrate with them now that the ordeal of Batista’s repression had ended. He wanted them on his side, come what may.

The Caravan of Liberation, as they called it, traveled the Central Highway from Santiago to Bayamo, then to Holguín, where correspondent Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune caught up to Castro. Fidel once again disavowed any relationship with the communists. He also said that he sought amicable relations with the Americans, “as long as the United States is friendly to us.”⁷ Castro made long speeches, usually late at night, in major cities like Santa Clara. The Mexican journalist Carlos Castañeda rode in Castro’s car for part of the trip. They listened together as the car radio announced the names of the ministers who were to serve in President Manuel Urrutia’s interim cabinet. Castro said he did not know many of them. That may have been true literally, but Urrutia’s ministers in exile had been collaborating with M26 for two years.⁸ Everyone in the émigré community had no other choice but to associate with the men of the Sierra Maestra.

Fidel had been saying in his speeches that he would not serve in the interim government; he desired only to reestablish the honor of the new Cuban armed forces. Passing through the port city of Cienfuegos, Fidel had dinner with Comandante William Morgan of the allied rebel group the Second Front. Morgan was one of the few Americans to gain a leadership position in the fight against Batista. He and his colleagues fought in the Escambray Mountains and occupied the port of Cienfuegos on the day Batista fled from Cuba. They wanted prominent positions in the new military.⁹ Ed Sullivan and his television crew were waiting for Fidel’s entourage in Matanzas to record the first American TV interview with the victorious Castro. Fidel told Sullivan that Batista would be the last dictator of Cuba. “Now we are going to improve our democratic institutions,” Castro said. “This is a fine young man,” Sullivan announced during his Sunday night variety show. “With the help of God and our prayers and the help of the American government, he will be able to come up with the sort of democracy down there” that the United States enjoys.¹⁰ Castro also visited the parents of the deceased anti-Batista resistance leader José Antonio Echeverría, who died in an attack on the Presidential Palace in 1957. Castro also went to Echeverría’s gravesite in the town of Cárdenas. In victory, Castro acknowledged the martyrdom of someone who, had he lived, might have been a postrevolutionary rival. But animosities remained between M26 and Echeverría’s Revolutionary Directorate (Directorio Revolucionario or DR).

In January 1959, the rural guerrillas of the DR, who had joined Che Guevara in the battle of Santa Clara, were spoiling for high-level participation in the new government. For this reason, surviving DR operatives occupied the Presidential Palace. They turned over the palace to interim president Manuel Urrutia a few days later, but not without some tense negotiations with Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos.¹¹ In the meanwhile, DR fighters broke into the armory of the military base at San Antonio de los Baños, south of the capital. There they seized hundreds of rifles and machine guns.

Revolutionary Directorate militants stored these weapons at the University of Havana, where many had been students protesting the Batista regime before they took up arms with Echeverría. The cache served to reinforce their demands for political influence. The only American guerrilla in the ranks of Fidel’s M26, Neill Macaulay, had stopped by the university during the DR occupation. “The rebels at the University were quite different from the peasant and working-class barbudos,” he later wrote. Macaulay observed more than three hundred students at the university who identified deeply with the veterans of the Presidential Palace attack. “They were intense, animated young men with ideas and strong convictions,” he said.¹²

Finally, shortly after noon on January 8, 1959, Fidel’s caravan entered Havana. A crowd numbering in the tens of thousands had been waiting along the Malecón. Not a single other revolutionary chieftain or returning politician received such a reception. “I must see him!” a woman said to an American news reporter. “He has saved us! He has liberated us from a monster and from gangsters and assassins!”¹³ Fidel Castro greeted the multitudes in a slow procession along this famous seaside boulevard that terminated at the Presidential Palace. Interim president Urrutia greeted him at the ornate doorway. Fidel invited the crowd to his speech that night at Camp Columbia.

Before anything else, Fidel would have to deal with the Directorio Revolucionario. For that purpose, he resolved to utilize his popularity and oratorical skills in his major address of January 8, 1959, before the new Revolutionary Army. As Castro, not yet thirty-three years of age, began to address his troops and the thousands of others gathered at Camp Columbia, someone released three white doves. Two landed on the speaker’s rostrum, and one alighted on the shoulder of the fatigue-clad Fidel Castro. The doves stayed there during part of the speech. The idea that God himself was anointing this young guerrilla leader crossed the minds of the awed onlookers.

“¿Armas para qué?” (Weapons for what?) he asked during the speech, referring to the Revolutionary Directorate. “To fight against whom? … Today there is no torture, assassination or dictatorship. Today there is only happiness.”

“Weapons! What for?” Castro asked again. “So that we can watch gangsterism and daily skirmishes flourish? Weapons for what? Well, I say to you that two days ago, members of a certain organization entered the San Antonio barracks … and took 500 machine guns and other weapons.… If they were seeking provocations, what they lacked was not guns but only men of the people to support them.”¹⁴ The commandant of Camp Columbia, Camilo Cienfuegos, stood behind Fidel on the platform. Fidel turned to him in the middle of his address and asked, “¿Cómo voy, Camilo?” (How am I doing, Camilo?) “Vas bien, Fidel,” said Cienfuegos—“You’re doing fine.”¹⁵

Castro’s speech swayed Cuban public opinion, and the Directorio Revolucionario capitulated. It abandoned its occupation of the University of Havana, gave up the weapons, and joined the rebel army in subordination to its comandante en jefe Fidel Castro. Leaders of the Revolutionary Directorate and also those of the splinter rebel group, the Second National Front of the Escambray, accepted positions in the rebel armed forces. They retained their ranks as comandantes as well as the facial hair. These included Fauré Chomón and Rolando Cubela of the DR and Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and the American William Morgan of the Second Front. Not all future challenges would be so easy to resolve, however, as some revolutionaries realized. “This Revolution [will be] more difficult than the war of liberation that ended on the 31st of December,” Comandante Cami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Introduction
• Part One: Revolution and Counterrevolution in Cuba
• Part Two: The Secret War for South America
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Statements by Ernesto “Che” Guevara prior to His Execution in Bolivia
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Index