One of the things that rankle with the Cubans is a long standing tendency in Washington to look at their country as a prize to be taken like Texas, California, and the other parts of the West which we seized from Mexico. They can quote declarations going back as far as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams on the advisability of eventually grabbing Cuba. They cite proposals of statesmen of the Southern slavocracy to wrest Cuba from Spain and make it another slave state.
American troops were landed in Cuba [in 1898] under the proclaimed aim of aiding the Cuban struggle for independence. The Spanish-American War was short. Spain signed a peace treaty on December 10 ceding the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico outright to the United States and relinquishing Cuba. But American troops did not leave the island. They stayed four years as an army of occupation....
Today, to expose the hypocrisy of State Department propaganda, the Cubans remind Americans of that army of occupation. "You demand that the Castro government hold immediate elections," they say. "But when your army occupied our country, you prevented elections from being held for four years."
President McKinley sent American troops to intervene in the civil war in Cuba in 1898 ostensibly to aid the independence movement. His real reason was to make Cuba safe for American investments. That was why the troops were kept there for four years. By the time they were ready to leave, Cuba was safe for the Almighty Dollar.
Domination by U.S. capital
By 1959 private American capital investments were listed
at around $850 million. This does not sound like very much
compared, say, to the some $2 billion which the Pentagon
and State Department are reputed to take out of the public
till each year for nothing but worldwide spying. But
America's financial sharks are noted for their
exceptionally strong parental instincts. They suffer
agonies if the smallest investment is endangered; they will
fight ferociously to protect it from harm; and they are
fabled for their solicitude in providing it with human
flesh, bones, and nerves so that it will prosper and grow.
Thus, a half century after the American troops were withdrawn, at least 40 percent of the sugar production in Cuba was held by U.S. corporations. About 90 percent of the island's mineral wealth was in the hands of Americans, and 80 percent of public utilities. Cuba's oil resources were completely owned by American and British corporations. The biggest cattle ranches were likewise listed in the investment portfolios of American coupon clippers....
In Cuba, sugar customarily accounted for two-thirds of the national income and 80 percent of exports. Property holdings became so concentrated that until the agrarian reform of a year ago, 75 percent of all the cultivated land was held by some 8 percent of the country's property owners. About 700,000 peasants held no land at all.
In the Nation of January 23, 1960, Robert Taber summarizes figures indicating the situation facing the working class as follows:
Of the total Cuban labor force of 2,204,000, some
361,000 persons were wholly unemployed throughout 1957;
150,000 were employed only part of the time; 154,000 were
engaged in unremunerated labor-e.g., as domestic servants,
working for their meals and lodgings. Of 1,539,000 Cubans
gainfully employed, 954,000 earned less than $75 a month in
a nation where the peso was on a par with the dollar and
had even less purchasing power in Havana than in New York.
Conditions in the countryside
These are graphic figures; but they fail to indicate the
plight of the 500,000 sugar workers in Cuba's main
industry. Employment for them existed each year only during
the four months of the harvest. The other eight months were
known as the "dead time."
They went without dental care, losing their teeth when they were still young. And they went without medical care.
As for education, some two million Cubans could neither read nor write.
Tens of thousands of fertile acres, growing to weeds, were available for cultivation, but feudal-minded landlords barred this. Cuba's long-suffering victims of chronic hunger, malnutrition, and abysmal poverty had to avoid trespassing on land that really belonged to the people as a whole. To heighten their bitterness, Wall Street's propagandists made sure that they heard all about the "free world" and its wonders, particularly the prosperous "American Way of Life."
The American propagandists need not have rubbed it in. The Cuban masses were well prepared to desire a change in their way of life....
[A] survey, based on a thousand interviews in Havana and other cities and therefore reflecting urban sentiment, was made in May under the direction of the Institute for International and Social Research, of Princeton, N.J., headed by Lloyd A. Free.
"If this report is at all accurate," Peter Edson was forced to admit in the rabidly anti-Castro New York World Telegram, "it should dispel any hopes that the Castro regime is about to be overthrown."
Eighty-six percent of the Cuban people support Fidel Castro's revolutionary government, finding conditions now better than they were under the Batista regime overthrown in 1959.
Eight percent rate the Castro regime worse than Batista's. Three percent believe the two about equal. And 3 percent refuse to express an opinion....
Reasons listed for satisfaction with the Castro government included the following:
Approval of its agrarian reform program, 26 percent.
Educational reform and campaign against illiteracy, 18 percent.
Social justice and concern for workers, farmers and the poor, 17 percent.
Economic progress and concern over unemployment, 8 percent.
Inculcation of nationalism and patriotism among the people, 6 percent.
Safety of the individual with an end to killing and physical abuses by the police, 6 percent.
The statistics speak for themselves. They register overwhelming approval of the sweeping measures taken since the revolution toppled the Batista dictatorship.
If these measures are borne in mind it is not difficult to understand why enthusiasm is so high. Under Batista, Cuba was like a concentration camp. Today the fortresses that housed the dictator's murderous armed forces have been torn down or converted into schools. To most Cubans, this change alone symbolizes what the revolution has accomplished.
But that was only the beginning. For the ordinary person, economic conditions in Cuba in Batista's time were like those of the Great Depression of the thirties in the U.S.A. As the first installment on their promises, the revolutionary leaders slashed rents, lowered essential food costs, raised wages, and began tackling the unemployment problem.
Then came the agrarian reform. This recovered the fertile land that had been fenced in by giant American corporations and feudal-minded Cuban landholders. Land is now being parceled out to family farmers. The government at the same time initiated a cooperative movement that holds great promise. Cuba's basic labor force, the sugar workers, saw a new future opening up-an indescribably bright future, if it is recalled that under Batista normal unemployment lasted eight to nine months a year.
Nationalization of industries and land
As America's corporate interests sought to counter such
progressive measures by savage economic and political
attacks, the Cuban government responded by taking control
of many of their holdings. "Intervention," the
establishment of control, was followed quite frequently by
nationalization. Each time this occurred on a dramatic
scale, as in the case of the oil refineries, the island
resounded with shouts of approval.
Intervention and nationalization have gone so far that all of Cuba's major industries, including the key plantations and sugar mills, are now in government hands. Wall Street investments, rated as high as $1 billion among the stock gamblers and their Democratic and Republican spokesmen in government, have reverted to the Cuban people. At this writing, the only major property still held by Wall Street is in Cuba's rich mineral resources. These, however, appear marked for early nationalization.
The beginnings of planned economy were established in the fall of 1959 during a series of great public demonstrations of approval. The beginnings proved successful. Planned economy - the first in the Western Hemisphere! - is now destined for rapid growth in Cuba.
Even if the Cubans find themselves compelled to make quite a few sacrifices because of the terrible pressures that the American monopolists can exert, they have already demonstrated that they will respond with the greatest determination and heroism.
They have begun to win their way out of the prison of capitalism and, as the polls show, they see no reason for returning.