CHAPTER 1
HISTORY: BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
"One of the most rich and desirable possessions existing in the world" — General Leonard Wood, 1901
Cubans sometimes refer to their homeland as the "sleeping alligator" because of its shape. This imaginary creature lies at the western end of the Antilles chain of Caribbean islands, close to the jaws of the Gulf of Mexico. Haiti is just 60 miles east and Key West, the southernmost point of the continental United States, 90 miles to the north. Cuba occupies about the same area as England but stretches over 745 miles from end to end. The capital, Havana, where more than two million of the island's population of eleven million live, sits on the northwestern coast, near where the alligator's tail meets its body.
The island is largely low-lying, with great swathes of central Cuba given over to sugar and citrus plantations. Europeans cross the Atlantic Ocean in order to lie on Cuba's beaches for two weeks, but the country's greatest natural assets are its mountains. There are three main ranges — the Cordillera de Guaniguanico in the west, the central Escambray mountains, and the more rugged Sierra Maestra, which extends along the southeastern coast and sheltered Fidel Castro and his fellow rebels during their guerrilla campaign in the 1950s.
Thousands of islands pepper the waters around Cuba. Most of these show up merely as pinpricks on a map, but the largest encompasses an area of about 890 square miles: this is the Isla de la Juventud or Island of Youth. Once known as the Isla del Tesoro ("Treasure Island") — the inspiration for the title of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous tale of adventure — and the Isla de los Pinos ("Isle of Pines"), the island was given its new name in 1978 in recognition of the thousands of foreign students working and studying there.
First Encounters
Archaeology provides scant rewards in Cuba. The piecing together of the island's early history relies much more on conjecture than on concrete evidence.
Tribes from Central or South America arrived in waves from around 1000BC, possibly even earlier. The Siboneys settled first, making their homes in caves and living off fishing. They survived only in the west of the island at the time of the Conquest, having been forced into a corner by the fiercer Tamos, a tribe of Arawak Indians who came from the Orinoco basin on the South American mainland — some as late as 1460. The Tamos farmed and made ceramic pots, activities that represented the peak of sophistication in pre-Columbian Cuba. They enslaved the less-advanced Siboneys but were a peaceable tribe, ill-disposed to take much of a stand against the European conquistadores.
Christopher Columbus caught his first glimpse of Cuba on October 27, 1492 and declared that he had "never seen anything so beautiful." Convinced that he had reached the Asian continent of the Great Khan, he sent his men off in search of "a king and great cities." They found only small villages of thatched huts — the so-called bohíos, which still pepper the Cuban countryside — and people inhaling the smoke of "certain herbs": this was the Europeans' first encounter with tobacco, one of the few legacies left by the Indians.
The Takeover
Spain showed little interest in Cuba at first. Occupation by the Europeans began finally in 1511, when Diego Velasquez disembarked with 300 men near Guantanamo Bay in the southeast. It was a swift and cruel affair which was wrapped up by 1514. The only real resistance was led by Hatuey, a fearsome Indian from the neighboring island of Hispaniola, who tried to rally the Tamos by recounting tales of the Spanish atrocities from which he and others had fled. His reception was lukewarm, however, and he was eventually caught. Hatuey preferred death by fire to conversion to the Christianity of his captors.
The early conquistadores came merely in search of easy spoils, and as soon as Cuba's gold ran out many of them headed off to the richer pastures of Mexico and Peru. Only geography prevented complete neglect of the island. Placed neatly at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba was crucial in protecting Spanish ships traveling between the New World colonies and Europe against attack by foreign fleets and pirates. The fledgling capital of Havana soon boasted Latin America's most formidable collection of fortresses and became the assembly point for Spanish ships heading back across the Atlantic.
Away from the hubbub of maritime activity in Havana, development was haphazard. The encomienda system, which gave the first colonizers a piece of land and a certain number of Indians to work it, was a feudal system infinitely worse than anything that existed in Spain. It forced the indigenous people into a life of slavery which in the end destroyed them; those who did not die of malnutrition, disease, or maltreatment, killed themselves.
Slaves were shipped in from Africa to replace the depleted workforce. Many ended up on sugar plantations, where they were obliged to live like animals in huts called barracones. Slave-owners forced the strongest, healthiest men to breed with the fittest women to produce children whom they could then sell for a good price at auction. Rebellious slaves, known as cimarrones, fled their infernal lives and formed communities called palenques, mostly in the mountainous Oriente. A few lucky Africans were able to buy their liberty, while others were released by masters undergoing deathbed repentances.
A Case of Monopoly
The island's economy made only slow progress during the early colonial period, and until the eighteenth century Cuba's claim to be "The Pearl of the Antilles" was largely wishful thinking. It was foreign intervention that finally woke Cuba from its torpor.
Spain had faced competition from other European powers in the Caribbean for some time, and in 1762 the British finally managed to capture Havana. They returned the city to Spain in exchange for Florida after just eleven months, but during their short stay managed to change the course of Cuban history. By dropping the trade restrictions that had banned the island from doing business with any country other than Spain, the British opened up a new market for their merchants and helped to launch Cuba's export trade.
Back in Spanish hands, Cuba's economy received another unexpected boost in 1791, when a slave uprising in the French-ruled half of Hispaniola, now Haiti, destroyed that territory's sugar industry. Almost overnight, Cuba took over the role as the largest producer of sugar in the Caribbean. The island's hardwood forests and grazing lands disappeared beneath a blanket of sugar-cane. In 1818, a royal decree opened Cuban ports to international trade and fueled the sugar boom further.
The speed of economic development was matched by growing frustration among the creoles (criollos), people of Spanish descent born on the island. Some of them had achieved considerable success as cattle-breeders and tobacco and sugar planters, but found their horizons curtailed by Spanish rule. The so-called peninsulares, born in Spain, formed an elite that not only controlled trade but was guaranteed the administration's top jobs, leaving the criollos with no say in the running of the country. The economic struggle gradually turned into a battle for political power, and ultimately for sovereignty.
¡Viva Cuba Libre!
Many of the wealthiest criollo bourgeoisie favored reform, but not necessarily a revolution. Greater than their desire for independence was their fear of the Afro-Cubans — a sentiment they shared with the peninsulares and one that developed into hysteria following the revolt in Haiti and the rapid rise in the number of slaves that accompanied Cuba's sugar boom; by the 1840s, slaves made up as much as 45 percent of the population. Such fears were deep-seated enough to delay Cuba's bid for independence until well after other Latin American countries (except Puerto Rico) had liberated themselves from Spain. Gradually, the impetus for independence passed to the criollos of Oriente. Left behind by the sugar boom in the west, small planters in Cuba's eastern province had little to lose by upsetting the status quo. One such plantation owner called Carlos Manuel de Céspedes launched Cuba's first war of liberation on October 10,1868 by freeing his slaves.
Máximo Gómez, a defector from the Spanish army, and Antonio Maceo, a bold mulatto known as the "Titan of Bronze," led a spirited military campaign. They were eventually defeated not on the battlefield but by their criollo backers, who could not overcome their mistrust of the peasants and ex-slaves who made up the rebel army, and capitulated to the Spanish in 1878. The Ten Years' War had killed more than 250,000 Cubans, including Céspedes, shattered illusions and destroyed the sugar industry. Nevertheless, it contributed to the abolition of slavery in 1886 and laid the ground for the next confrontation.
José Martí
A short man with a long, melancholy mustache, José Marti was an unlikely leader of Cuba's independence struggle. Exiled to Spain in 1870 for his separatist views, he made his way to the United States, where he wrote tirelessly and traveled around Cuban émigré communities to unite a revolutionary movement demoralized by defeat. Marti was the first man to define exactly what the independence movement should be fighting for: not just self-rule but democracy and social justice. He advocated racial equality and rallied behind him both Afro-Cubans, who had escaped slavery but not misery, and mixed-race Cubans who faced systematic discrimination. They were joined by an increasingly class-conscious urban workforce and growing ranks of the frustrated middle class.
Martí believed that the Ten Years' War had been lost through bad organization. He founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), to unify all those behind independence, and persuaded Maceo and Gómez to plan the new military strategy. The campaign began near Santiago in the east of the island on February 24,1895. Facing a force five times its size, the liberation army pushed the enemy steadily westwards until by 1898, Spain and its commanders were exhausted both militarily and economically. With the Cubans on the brink of triumph, the U.S. snatched victory.
How the War Was Won
José Marti, shot dead in battle on May 19, 1895, had warned of North American expansionism. In a letter to a friend he had written, "Once the United States is in Cuba, who will get it out?" The Americans had long coveted the island, and as early as 1807, Thomas Jefferson commented that Cuba would make a valuable addition to the United States. With an eye to a business opportunity, Americans had eagerly pursued Cuban planters left impoverished after the Ten Years' War and bought up property at bargain prices. They soon dominated the sugar industry, and by 1895 more than 90 percent of Cuba's sugar went to the U.S., along with the vast majority of its other exports.
Washington was reluctant to sacrifice such a profitable relationship for the sake of Cuban independence. Following the sinking in Havana harbor of an American ship, the USS Maine, in February 1898, Washington accused the Spanish of sabotage and declared war. (It was never proved that Spain was to blame, and the evidence points the finger at the Americans themselves.) Within months the colonial army surrendered to an American occupying force. The Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, was negotiated behind the backs of the islanders and transferred sovereignty of Cuba to the United States.
Washington contemplated annexation but in the end allowed the Cubans to elect their own government. There was much jubilation on May 20,1902, as Cuba was declared a Republic, acquired its first president, in the shape of Tomás Estrada Palma, and American troops began to withdraw. But the price paid for the end of military occupation was the acceptance of the Platt Amendment, which proclaimed Washington's right to intervene at any time "for the preservation of Cuban independence." It also provided for the establishment of the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, 50 miles east of Santiago, to be leased "in perpetuity." The Amendment was repealed in 1934, but the naval base remained and has been a continual source of aggravation for Fidel Castro's government.
The Years of the Fat Cows
More than 300,000 people had died simply to replace rule by Spain with economic and political control by the U.S. Fidel Castro in his speeches still refers to the five decades which followed independence as the "pseudo" or "neo-colonial" republic.
American monopolies cornered almost every sphere of activity. By 1925, they controlled electricity generation and owned the railways, while the Cuban Telephone Company did not even bother to give its network a Spanish name. However, it was sugar that held the key to U.S. domination. By the 1920s, U.S. companies produced more than half the annual crop. Small farmers were squeezed out by the large estates created to meet their northern neighbor's appetite for sugar. Other crops and industry were neglected, forcing Cuba to import everything from tomatoes to cars, supplied (most conveniently) by the U.S. Business bank accounts swelled while ordinary Cubans endured increasing poverty. Amid rising anger at the corruption of politicians, Gerardo Machado won the presidency in 1924 with his slogan "honesty in government." He started out reasonably well but later introduced Cuba to its first brutal military dictatorship.
Social unrest intensified steadily until the labor movement, galvanized by the Communist Party, called a general strike in 1933. The show of popular discontent succeeded in toppling Machado and sparked a mini-revolution by an unlikely alliance of militant students from Havana University — a traditional hotbed of radical thought — and dissatisfied sergeants under a certain Fulgencio Batista. The army, however, had no intention of collaborating with the reformist government that emerged, and after three months Batista (by then a colonel) staged a coup.
The Rise of Batista
Batista enjoyed some initial popularity. A handsome mulatto of lower-class origins, he was a rarity among Cuba's ruling oligarchy, which was traditionally rich and white. While he manipulated a string of elections and presidents, he also helped to implement one of the most progressive constitutions in Latin America. He also legalized the trade unions and even introduced welfare reform. Batista's flirtation with the Communist Party helped him to win the presidential elections in 1940, but he could not repeat the trick in 1944. He went into "voluntary exile" while first Ramón Grau and then Carlos Prio were voted into the top job.
The Cuban people, disgusted by political corruption, oppression, and their continued poverty, had begun rallying around Eduardo Chibás, leader of the Orthodox Party. His calls for social justice made him a contender in the elections of 1952, but suffering from severe depression, Chibás shocked Cuba by shooting himself during a live radio broadcast on August 5,1951. With his last words "People of Cuba, rise and move forward! People of Cuba, awake!" etched in their memory, Cubans watched in horror as Batista returned from exile and, on March 10,1952, staged a coup.
Fulgencio Batista imposed the harshest dictatorship Cuba had yet seen. He abolished the Constitution, dissolved Congress, and crushed the opposition ruthlessly. Thousands died in the violence, but that did not deter support from Washington.
Cuba enjoyed one of the highest per capita incomes in Latin America but wavered on the edge of social collapse. Misery reigned in the countryside while Havana glittered. The Cuban capital was one of Latin America's most sophisticated cities, and a byword for hedonism the world over.
The "Fabulous Fifties"
Havana was one of the most fashionable places in the world. A pantheon of America's rich and famous, from Marilyn Monroe to Errol Flynn, arrived by plane or ferry from Florida. They glided around the Cuban capital in Cadillacs, which still cruise the streets today, and entertained themselves drinking daiquiris and mojitos at Sloppy Joe's or the Floridita, Ernest Hemingway's favorite haunt. They splashed their money about the casinos, or sought titillation from the sex shows at the Shanghai Theatre or from Havana's answer to the Folies Bergères, the Tropicana. Frank Sinatra was reputedly paid $1,000 a night to perform at this, Latin America's most extravagant variety show. Graham Greene took Mr. Wormold to it in Our Man in Havana: "Chorus-girls paraded twenty feet up among the great palm-trees, while pink and mauve searchlights swept the floor. A man in bright blue evening clothes sang in Anglo-American about Paree."
The Mafia swooped down on Havana with ambitious plans to turn it into an offshore Las Vegas. Fulgencio Batista and the gangsters controlled tourism between them, and they built many of the high-rise hotels which still fill the skyline of Havana's Vedado district. Meyer Lansky, who had had associations with Cuba ever since the 1920s (when he used the island as a supply base for rum sold in the Prohibition-stricken U.S.), was Havana's chief mobster. A hundred representatives of the Cosa Nostra, as well as celebrities such as Ginger Rogers and Lou Costello, attended the opening in December 1957 of the luxurious Habana Riviera Hotel, whose casino became Lansky's headquarters. When the Revolution forced Batista to flee, the Mafia went too. Their roulette and fruit machines were thrown out onto the street, and gambling in all its forms remains illegal to this day.
