Vol. 71/No. 12      March 26, 2007

When the First Declaration of Havana was read that September day by Fidel Castro, Cuba’s prime minister at the time, and a central leader of the Cuban Revolution, more than 1 million people raised their hands in approval.

Condemning “the exploitation of man by man, and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by imperialist finance capital,” the document proclaimed “the right of peasants to the land; the right of workers to the fruit of their labor; the right of children to education … the right of states to nationalize the imperialist monopolies, thereby recovering their national wealth and resources; the right of countries to engage freely in trade with all the peoples of the world; the right of nations to their full sovereignty.”

The road to conquering those rights had been opened in Cuba 20 months earlier, when working people, under the leadership of the July 26 Movement and the Rebel Army, had overthrown the hated U.S.-backed tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.

The weeks leading up to and following the Declaration of Havana were marked by sharp class battles. The toilers of Cuba responded with resolve to every blow by U.S. imperialism in league with Cuban counterrevolutionaries, defending their gains by deepening inroads into the prerogatives of the capitalists and landlords, Cuban and foreign-born.  
 
‘Interventions’
Upon taking power on Jan. 1, 1959, the revolutionary government immediately began responding to the demands and political initiatives of workers and poor farmers. Rents were cut in half. Utility rates were slashed. Laws ending discrimination against Blacks were enacted and enforced. By mid-May of that year, as peasants and farm workers occupied land and resisted plunder and indignities by landlords, a deep-going agrarian reform was launched. Holdings of more than 1,000 acres were nationalized. More than 100,000 small farmers, sharecroppers, and others in the countryside were given deeds to the land they tilled.

Through their own actions, and with resolute backing and encouragement from the revolutionary government, working people grew increasingly self-confident. They organized and mobilized to stifle attempts at economic sabotage by bosses—Cuban and foreign-born—while taking greater control over running their respective industries, including conditions on the job.

From the start, the property of the former dictator and his cronies was “intervened”—a process in which committees appointed by the revolutionary government assumed control of these companies, and audited their books. Workers—in many cases, former rebel fighters—began organizing to help operate these businesses in the interests of working people. Similarly, the government began intervening companies that were firing workers, or refusing to address their demands in labor disputes.

Probes against two U.S.-owned public utilities were launched shortly after the triumph. These resulted in the intervention of the Cuban Telephone Co. on March 3, 1959, and a government audit of the Cuban Electric Co. in April.

The government ordered phone rates rolled back to the level prior to March 13, 1957, the day Batista had authorized the local subsidiary of U.S. conglomerate International Telegraph and Telephone (ITT) to double its rates. Batista’s payoff from ITT had been $3 million and a solid gold telephone. Phone workers helped implement the new decree by resetting 4,575 pay phones in Havana in four hours.

Along with the audit, Cuban Electric was forced to reinstate with full back pay hundreds of workers fired as far back as 1952 because of their political activity against Batista. Inspection of its books exposed practices of inflating costs to overcharge for services, and of transferring profits in the form of “expenses” and other “non-itemized” payments to its parent company, the American & Foreign Power. By August 1960, the commission supervising the company’s operations reported that by eliminating managers’ and lawyers’ fees, advertising, and similar expenses, Cuba would save $2 million annually that could be used to develop the country and meet pressing social needs.

Throughout this whole period, numerous other such battles by working people were reported in the Cuban press. Here are a few examples:

• With documents in hand, including copies of checks and a detailed description of the bosses’ plans, the workers at El Morro cement factory blocked an embezzlement attempt by its U.S. and Cuban managers, leading to their intervention on Aug. 20, 1960.

• The following weekend, telephone workers carried out “Operation Tape,” fixing permanently, over two days of voluntary labor, more than half of the 501 temporary cable splices in Havana. Calixto de la Nuez, one of the most experienced workers, volunteered to lead a “cable workers academy” to teach soldering, blueprint reading, and more.

• After the U.S. owner of Continental, a can manufacturer, fled the island, lathe operator Leonelo Abello led an intervention of the plant by its 600 workers. They organized to increase productivity and ensure that goals were met daily, including by volunteering overtime when needed.

• In August 1960, salespeople at Rohele, a fabric and yarn store, demanded it be intervened for discrimination in its refusing lay-away sales to Blacks and members of the armed forces.

• Working people in the cities led efforts such as “Operation Cow” and “Operation Seeds” through their unions and workplaces to purchase cows, pigs, seeds, and more for the newly established farm cooperatives on land nationalized under the 1959 agrarian reform (there were more than 750 co-ops by May 1960).

In a related measure, at the end of August 1960, the Labor Ministry approved a resolution establishing the Councils of Technical Advice, made up of workers and new managers of intervened factories to help workers learn to run them.  
 
Battle against oil monopolies
Imperialist-organized attacks seeking to undermine the revolution—air raids to burn cane fields, bombings, diplomatic pressures—were accompanied by attempts to sabotage Cuba’s economy.

Early in 1960, the revolutionary government had reached trade agreements with the Soviet Union, including oil purchases that could save Cuba $24 million yearly. Texaco, Esso, and Shell saw this as a threat to their monopoly practices, by which, for instance, they would “purchase” a $2.10 barrel of oil from their parent companies at $2.80 and then sell it in Cuba at a profit. They refused to refine the Soviet oil and muscled shipping companies abroad to stop transporting it.

The revolutionary government responded on June 28 of that year with Resolution 188: if Texaco continued to refuse refining oil imported from the USSR, the Cuban Oil Institute (ICP) would intervene the U.S. oil giant.

The following day, in Santiago de Cuba, Alfredo Estrada, of the revolutionary government’s oil institute, presented the resolution to assistant manager Robert Carter. Estrada instructed Carter to process 80,000 barrels of oil the government was holding in tanks in Santiago. Carter responded that Texaco was under no obligation to process oil other than its own. The government proceeded to nationalize the refinery.

The intervention “provoked great joy among the workers,” Revolución, the daily newspaper of the July 26 Movement, reported. “They organized a spontaneous rally in support of the measure and the revolutionary government,” it said. Workers and technicians pledged that “work will not stop and the Cuban oil will be rapidly processed.” Rifles at the ready and sporting their militia uniforms, refinery workers guarded the facilities. The Revolución reporter noted that a dismayed boss, answering the phone right in the midst of these events, limited himself to uttering, in English, “Not so good!”

Decrees 189 and 190, enforced against British-owned Shell and U.S.-owned Esso two days later, proved timely as well. It turned out that all three outfits had suspended importing oil for weeks and had supplies left for no more than a couple of days.

By the end of August, 35 tankers, carrying over 3.5 million barrels of crude from the Soviet Union, had reached Cuban ports.

Throughout the country, working people hailed the interventions of the imperialist-owned refineries, exploding in spontaneous marches and rallies of support—Guantánamo rail workers; Havana construction and port workers; tobacco workers in Ciego de ávila; carpenters, stevedores, store employees, shoe makers, and cooks in Oriente province; as well as sugar cane workers in mills across the island.  
 
U.S. ‘Dagger Law’
The efforts by Cuba’s working people to exert control over their national patrimony were met with what they termed the “Dagger Law,” adopted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law July 6, 1960, by U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower. The law slashed by 95 percent—some 700,000 tons—that year’s sugar quota Washington had agreed to import from Cuba.

At the closing of an assembly of sugar cane workers in Artemisa, Pinar del Río, the previous week, Fidel Castro had explained how the Cuban people would respond to Washington’s stepped-up threats and hostile measures. “If they try to starve our people into submission … the Yankees will end up here without even the tacks of their shoes,” Castro said. “As they take away the quota pound by pound, we will take away from them sugar mill by sugar mill, and wrest penny by penny from them, up to the last U.S. investment in Cuba.”

The battle cry, Castro said to an uproar of approval, must be: “¡Sin cuota, pero sin amo. Sin americanos, pero con patria!” (Without quota, but without a master! Without the Americans, but with a homeland!)

Within 72 hours of Washington’s slashing the sugar quota, Moscow announced it would purchase all Cuban sugar the U.S. rulers refused to buy. Beijing followed suit, purchasing another half million tons.

As these battles kept sharpening, Castro addressed millions on national television and radio on July 18, 1960, calling on Cuban toilers to be conscious the revolution had entered a “stage of struggle of immense importance.”

To carry out an agrarian reform, to free the peasantry, as the July 26 Movement had pledged from its origins, “You had to start by harming the interests of the powerful U.S. companies,” Castro said. “To reduce phone rates, you had to harm the interest of the powerful telephone company… . If you wanted to lower electric rates, you had to harm the interests of the powerful electric trust… . If you wanted to get cheaper oil, you had harm big oil interests.

“How can you possibly think you can make a revolution without clashing with those interests?” Castro said.

It was these class battles that helped pave the road for the biggest blow yet to U.S. capitalist interests. Right before midnight on Aug. 6, 1960—at the closing rally of the Latin American Youth Congress, at which nearly 1,000 young people from the Americas and beyond had gathered—Castro announced the expropriation of “all the assets and enterprises located on national territory … that are the property of U.S. persons and legal entities.”  
 
‘Se llamaba’
Castro read out the list of 26 U.S. companies from which Cuba was reconquering $829 million of its resources. As “Cuban Telephone Company” was read, the jubilant crowd, with working-class humor, loudly responded, “¡Se llamaba!” (“It used to be called!”). It would now be called the Compañía Cubana de Teléfonos 13 de Marzo, honoring freedom fighters of the Revolutionary Directorate assassinated by Batista’s regime on March 13, 1957.

Cuban Electric Company, Esso, Texaco, and Sinclair Oil, were next, along with some 20 landed interests, including all 36 U.S.-owned sugar mills.

As number 24—“United Fruit Company”—was read, former Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz approached the podium and embraced the Cuban leader, eliciting particular joy among the crowd. Arbenz’s government had been overthrown in 1954 in a CIA-organized coup after it approved a modest agrarian reform, threatening the interests of United Fruit, the biggest landholder there.

The trade unions then declared “Week of National Jubilation.” It was celebrated across the island with rallies and “funerals.” Thousands labeled coffins with the names and trademarks of the just-expropriated companies tossed them into the ocean or “cremated” them.

By the end of October 1960, Cuban toilers had expropriated virtually all imperialist-owned banks and industry, as well as the largest holdings of Cuba’s capitalist class. Property relations in city and countryside had been transformed, definitively establishing the character of the revolution as socialist—the first in the hemisphere—and making clear to all that state power now served the historic interests of working people.

The First Declaration of Havana pledged that Cuban working people would use that power to assist their brothers and sisters throughout the Americas and elsewhere who “take up the arms of liberty.” Nearly a half a century later, Cuba’s uncompromising international solidarity has turned and continues to make that pledge a reality.
 
 
Related articles:
300 at Vancouver event discuss book on Chinese Cubans in Cuban Revolution
N.Y. event discusses book by Chinese-Cuban generals
Federation of Cuban Women leaders speak in N.Y.  
 
 
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