Cuban History: Revolution (Part II)

Public housing high rises in Santiago de Cuba. Notice too the Russian-made vehicles in the foreground.

Castro's first priority was to eliminate the last remnants of the Batista regime. The new government formed tribunals and Batista's allies were sentenced to death by firing squad or to prison terms. And, with the Urban Reform Law passed in March, 1959, Batista's supporters lost their properties altogether, while other large property owners lost some of their holdings. Rents were reduced to historically low levels. Wage and price controls were also implemented, and the Agrarian Reform Law was passed in May. With this, the largest estates on the island were confiscated and redistributed in smaller parcels to small farmers or cooperatives.

Castro also began to implement major social reforms such as a literacy program, which would eventually assure that all Cubans could read and write, the construction of hospitals and public housing, and providing education and health care universally for free. These programs and laws led many of the privileged Cubans to believe that Castro was heading down the road to communism, and that they were the target, and between 1959 and 1961 approximately one million of these Cubans left the island, the first in a number of large migratory waves.

Education is free and universal in Cuba thanks to the Revolution. So too is medical care.

The United States also believed that Castro would soon be in the communist camp, if he was not already. While Castro had always claimed that his revolution was a nationalist, and not a communist, movement, the U.S. saw his programs and laws differently. It was clear to the Eisenhower Administration that U.S. interests would soon come under attack, for they owned a majority of the public utilities and fertile land on the island, and had a strong hold on the sugar industry. So, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to begin a program of military intervention to eliminate Castro by any means necessary, which included assassination attempts and training a group of Cuban exiles that would invade the island and remove Castro from power.

The U.S. also began to apply economic pressure. When Cuba confiscated U.S. owned oil refineries because they would not process oil from the Soviet Union, the U.S., in July, 1960, decreased Cuba's sugar quota, reducing its share of the U.S. market and its main source of income. Cuba responded by taking possession of all U.S.-owned sugar plantations and refineries. On October 19, the Department of the Treasury initiated a trade embargo, ending all commerce between the two nations, and five days later Cuba nationalized all U.S. owned assets. Official diplomatic relations came to an end in January, 1961.  

On April 17, 1961, the CIA-trained invasion force, known as Brigade 2506, entered the waters of the Bay of Pigs and the invasion force made its way onto Girón Beach. Castro, however, had been informed of the plan and had already rounded up thousands of potential counterrevolutionaries, and he defeated the invasion force easily. Bolstered by the victory and the subsequent overwhelming support of the Cuban people, Castro cancelled the elections scheduled for May and on December 2, 1961, he declared that he was a Communist and he immediately began a military and economic alliance with the Soviet Union.

Emblem of the CIA-trained Cuban Brigade 2506 [source: http://www.brigada2506.com ]

In September of the following year, U2 spy planes of the CIA photographed newly constructed nuclear missile installations in Cuba. On October 22, President Kennedy announced on national television that the U.S. would begin a naval blockade of Cuba, stopping any vessel that approached its shores. The ensuing days, known now as the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any other point during the East-West struggle known as the Cold War. Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev eventually removed the missiles without consulting Castro first, and in exchange the U.S. promised that it would not invade Cuba. Soon the U.S. also brought to an end its program for assassinating Fidel Castro, known as Operation Mongoose.

Castro now depended on the Soviet Union for economic assistance and the always important sugar trade, and he finished his plan to command completely and reorganize the economy. This reorganization, which included employment for all Cubans and set salaries that succeeded in distributing wealth equally among Cubans, also called for the reorganization of the psyche of Cubans, and to help with this Che Guevara introduced his "New Man" theory, which stated that people would work for the benefit of society rather than their own personal enrichment. However, most Cubans did not buy into this idea, and productivity eventually began to decline again.

Banner in Havana celebrating the victory at Girón: "Victory of the People."

In the following years there were ups and downs in the sugar industry, a general lack of consumer goods due to the trade embargo with the United States, and a greater dependence on the Soviet Union. When before the Spanish, and then the United States, dominated the island's economy, so too did the Soviet Union after 1961, for by the 1980s the communist superpower accounted for more than half of Cuba's exports and imports.

Meanwhile, in the mid-1960s, Castro, encouraged by his brother and Che, began a foreign policy that promoted the spread of revolution throughout the western hemisphere and in all of the underdeveloped countries of the world. In 1964, Che led a contingent of Cubans to assist the communist insurgents in the Congo in Africa, and in 1965, after returning to Habana, he left for Bolivia to begin a guerrilla war against the U.S. supported government. Che was eventually captured by a Bolivian Ranger group trained and equipped by the U.S. Army in October, 1967, and was executed soon thereafter. Later Cuba supported strongly the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile before it was overthrown by military officers with U.S. support in 1973, and Castro sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Angola in 1975 to help the communists in its civil war. Castro also aided the Nicaraguan Sandinistas before and after they expelled the ruthless dictator Somoza in 1979. 

Suspected Soviet nuclear installations in Cuba, 1962. [source: http://www.historyofcuba.com ]	President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev [source: http://www.historyofcuba.com ]

While Castro preached national liberation to the 3rd World, his people were not free to express dissent in anyway, and any form of protest was punishable by law as "anti-social behavior." In 1980 a few Cubans broke into the Peruvian embassy in Habana requesting political asylum. These few were followed by a few thousand. President Jimmy Carter offered to take these "refugees", and Castro consented. To the surprise of many, more than 120,000 people gathered to leave Cuba for asylum in the U.S. This exodus, known as the Mariel Boatlift, would be followed by another mass exodus in 1994 during the Clinton Administration as economic woes and the lack of political freedom continued to disintegrate Cuban society. 

In 1989, the Soviet Union disintegrated and Castro could no longer count on the $5 billion in aid he received each year from the superpower. Because of this, Cuba entered the "Special Period" in 1991, which was characterized by cuts in social programs, an expanded foreign debt that it still has not repaid, and a decline in the value of its exports. These measures were confronted by new initiatives by the United States to make the trade embargo more far reaching and effective as it prohibited the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to deal with Cuba and punished other nations that had trade relations with the island. During this time food and medicine were often in short supply, oil and electricity were depleted, and consumer goods were hard to find. 

In 1993, Castro made it legal for Cubans to possess and use U.S. dollars in transactions. This dramatically changed the economic lives of many Cubans, especially those in the tourist industry or those that received dollars from family members living overseas. Large government farms were broken up and distributed so that workers could form cooperatives, and private farmers markets were once again allowed. Tourism was encouraged, and the Cuban government began joint commercial ventures with foreign corporations in an effort to earn the dollars it desperately needed. These included the Meliá Hotel Group from Spain and Altadis, the Spanish firm with which Castro merged Cubatabaco to form Habanos, S.A., which now markets the Cuban cigar worldwide. 

Elián (third from left) with his father's family. [source: http://www.pbs.org ]

In February, 1996, the Cuban air force destroyed, somewhere in the skies over the Caribbean, two planes flown by the anti-Castro, Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue. Immediately after the incident, President Clinton signed into law the Helms-Burton Act, which stiffened the penalties for U.S. citizens and corporations that traded illegally with Cuba. The Cuban government was dismayed, yet allowed Pope John Paul II to visit the island in January, 1998. The world looked favorably on the Pope's visit, but controversy developed again during the custody battle over the Cuban boy Elián González. Elián had left Cuba on a raft with his mother, who was hoping to make it to the U.S. The mother died during the voyage, but the boy made it to the states. His father, who lived in Cuba, tried to get him back, but relatives in the U.S. refused to surrender the boy. Eventually, after a court order, the FBI stormed the house of Elián's family in Miami and returned the boy to Cuba, where he was greeted by his adoring countrymen.

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