Vol. 79/No. 17      May 11, 2015

But “this in no way means that the heart of the matter has been solved,” Cuban President Castro said at the time. “The economic, commercial and financial blockade, which causes enormous human and economic damages to our country, must cease.”

The 55-year-long U.S. embargo of Cuba, which is still in place, has no parallel in modern times.

When U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the island nation on Jan. 1, 1959, in the face of a massive popular uprising led by the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army, Washington hoped that it would just mean a change in the faces in government, and soon things would get back to business as usual.

But Fidel Castro, his fellow revolutionaries and the workers and farmers of Cuba were dead serious about changing social relations from top to bottom and defending Cuba’s sovereignty.

Before 1959, 60 percent of grain, 37 percent of vegetables, 84 percent of cooking oils and 80 percent of canned fruit consumed in Cuba were imported, mostly from the United States. Cuba’s main product was sugar, accounting for 80 percent of exports to the United States.

At the time of the revolution 75 percent of all the cultivated land was held by just 8 percent of land owners. Some 700,000 peasants held no land at all. Cuba’s 500,000 sugar workers were employed only during the four months of the harvest and barely scraped by through eight months of “dead time.”

But this only paints part of the picture. Famous for its tobacco, Cuba imported cigarettes from the U.S.; it exported sugar, but imported candies; tomatoes grown in Cuba were sent to the U.S. to be processed and returned as tomato paste, puree and sauce, for the profit of U.S. capital.

In May 1959 the first agrarian reform law was passed, expropriating the large plantations, eliminating the system of rents and mortgages crushing the peasantry, and granting land to those who worked it.

Worried about the direction things were going, capitalists in Cuba began sabotaging production. By mid-1959, Washington was backing armed counterrevolutionaries operating on the island.

Washington starts economic warfare

When the Soviet Union agreed to sell oil to Cuba at favorable prices and to transport it, the three companies refused to refine it. On June 28, 1960, the revolutionary government took over the Texaco refinery in Santiago de Cuba and three days later Esso’s and Shell’s.

A week later President Dwight Eisenhower took the first open measure of economic warfare against the revolution, canceling Cuba’s quota for sugar exports to the U.S.

On Aug. 6, 1960, Fidel Castro announced the expropriation of 26 U.S.-owned companies. As Castro read out the name of each company at a large rally, the crowd shouted out, “That’s what it used to be called.”

Workers and their trade unions organized armed workers militias to guard the installations against U.S.-backed attempts to sabotage them.

On Oct. 19 the Eisenhower administration officially imposed a sweeping trade embargo, prohibiting all exports to Cuba except food, medicine and medical supplies.

The Militant campaigned to tell the truth about the revolution, the mass mobilizations and the murderous response by Washington. Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate Farrell Dobbs demanded the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Guantánamo Bay naval base and urged workers to go to Cuba to see the revolution for themselves.

The revolutionary government launched a national literacy drive in 1961, with thousands of young volunteers heading from the cities into the countryside.

In April of that year, 1,500 mercenaries armed, trained and deployed by Washington invaded Cuba near the Bay of Pigs. In less than 72 hours Cuba’s revolutionary militias, police and armed forces routed them. On the eve of the invasion, Fidel Castro declared the revolution’s socialist character.

By the end of 1961, the embargo was ravaging the island’s economy: 25 percent of buses were not running, half of the train cars were out of service and nearly 75 percent of Caterpillar tractors were broken down due to lack of spare parts. From 1962 to 1963 trade with the U.S. and other capitalist countries fell by 60 percent. Many factories were paralyzed.

In February 1962, President John F. Kennedy extended the embargo. The Feb. 12, 1962, Militant pointed out the new measures only cut off “what little trickle of trade still existed.”

With no possibility to trade with the U.S., Havana turned to the Soviet Union, which ignored the embargo and became Cuba’s main trading partner. But they couldn’t make up for all Washington had cut off, and life became more difficult for Cuba’s workers and farmers.

When the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union collapsed at the start of the 1990s, Cuba lost more than 80 percent of its trade virtually overnight, what Cubans sometimes call a “second blockade.” Over the next decade Washington tightened the embargo even more, including stepping up sanctions on any other countries that dared trade with Cuba. Their goal was to bring the Cuban people to their knees.

The U.S. embargo has continued — as state policy — under 11 U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, including Obama. The Cuban government estimates that “at current prices, during all these years, the blockade has caused damages of more than $116.8 billion.”

Isolated, Washington shifts tactics

So the propertied rulers decided to shift tactics, charting a new offensive in their continuing drive to bring the revolution’s downfall.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan reflected the hopes of U.S. rulers when she wrote Dec. 18 that ending the embargo will open the door not just to more “American tourists and businessmen, American diplomats, American money, American ways and technology,” but an expansion of capitalist business in Cuba that will eat away at the revolution.

But the revolutionary determination of Cuban workers and farmers, and the caliber of the revolutionary leadership — Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara and many others — demonstrated over decades defending their conquests are a serious obstacle to Washington’s hopes.

That leadership continuity was strengthened by the experiences of more than 425,000 volunteers who fought against the forces of apartheid South Africa defending the sovereignty of Angola, helping lead to the overthrow of the white supremacist regime. And it has been reinforced with the return of the Cuban Five, revolutionaries who spent 16 years in U.S. prisons, framed up for their work preventing paramilitary groups from launching attacks on the island.

“Under today’s conditions, dangers are going to arise and we have to be vigilant. They will try to corrupt us and buy us off,” René González, one of the five, told students in Havana Feb. 19. “They will try to create a class in Cuba — the class that fortunately we were able to kick out in 1959. They’re going to try to create it here again,” he said. “That means there will be work to do, and all of us will have to join in.”

Cubans — and those who look to the example of the revolution worldwide — will fight to loosen every aspect of the embargo and open the doors to foreign trade, travel and normalized relations. As they do so, they will fight to defend Cuba’s socialist revolution.

It is a testimony to the strength of that revolution that 55 years after the start of the embargo, Cuba stands as a living example of why working people the world over should emulate their example.  
 
 
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