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Abstract
In 1959, Cuba’s Revolutionary leaders passed a sweeping Agrarian Reform. This article focuses on a group of black radical peasant organizers, many of them Communists, in order to rethink the origins of the revolutionary project. Based on oral histories, archival documents, and testimonial narratives, this article decenters Cuba’s revolutionary leaders to recover the lost stories and victories of black radicals who laid the groundwork for one of the revolution’s most socially, economically, and politically transformative measures and whose long-held commitment to socialism and agrarian justice made an early and deep impact on the origins and course of the Cuban Revolution.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Alexis Alarcón, Julio Corbea, and Víctor Sigue at the Casa del Caribe, and Julio Quiala Hernández at the Asociación de Combatientes, in Santiago, Cuba for their invaluable help in getting this project together. I am grateful to Ada Ferrer, Tony Wood, Cayetana Adrianzén Ponce, Teishan Latner, and Souls’ two anonymous reviewers for their consistently-helpful feedback on drafts of this paper.
About the Author
Sara Kozameh is a doctoral candidate in Latin American History at New York University. Her dissertation is titled, Harvest of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and the Making of Revolutionary Cuba, 1958–1970.
Notes
1 Not to be mistaken with Pablo Milanés, the famous singer. Milanés is a Hispanicization of Pablo’s family’s last name, Silnet. Pablo practices Vodou, not to be confused with the more syncretic, Santería.
2 Author interview with Pablo Milanés Fuentes, Pilón del Cauto, April 2017.
3 Ibid.
4 For years, official narratives of the revolution focused on the guerrilla insurgency in the mountains as the driving force behind Batista’s ouster. A recent body of literature has shown the ways in which women and urban revolutionaries were also critical to the success of Batista’s overthrow. On the role of women see, Michelle Chase, Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). On urban revolutionaries see, Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). For an account of the insurgency that decenters 26JM guerrillas, see Ramón Bonachea and Marta San Martin, The Cuban Insurrection, 1952-1959 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1974).
5 The popular and radical mobilizations of sugar workers in Cuba’s lowlands during the Republican era have been the subject of several excellent studies: Gillian McGillivray, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); and Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1925-1934,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), 102-103. While older anthropological scholarship tended to treat Cuba’s mountainous peasant’s as pre-political (for example, Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), recent work has centered long held peasant struggles in these highland regions (see Joanna Swanger, Rebel Lands of Cuba: The Campesino Struggles of Oriente and Escambray, 1934-1974 (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015).
6 New York Public Library, NYT Foreign Desk, Box 123, Folder 4. Confidential report on trip for Times Publisher, dated August 8, 1960. I am grateful to Ada Ferrer for sharing this source with me.
7 A body of scholarship pointing to the limitations and contradictory nature of “raceless nationhood” includes: Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-century Cuba (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 2001); Devyn Spence-Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and Danielle Pilar Clealand, The Power of Race in Cuba (Oxford University Press, 2017).
8 On the ways in which ideas of Cuba’s “raceless nationality” have given strength to anti-racist movements, see Ada Ferrer. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1999) and Alejandro de la Fuente, “Mitos de “Democracia Racial”: Cuba 1900-1912,” in (eds) Fernando Martínez Heredia, Rebecca J. Scott and Orlando García Martínez, Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878-1912 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2002).
9 In 1961, the Cuban Government initiated a massive campaign to eliminate illiteracy across the island, sending almost 300,000 volunteers to teach literacy to about 700,000 illiterate Cubans in even the most remote areas of Cuba. The illiteracy teachers formed brigades, and members were called brigadistas. See, Fagen, Richard R. Cuba: The Political Content of Adult Education (Stanford: Stanford University, 1964).
10 On the production of historical silencing, see, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
11 A well-developed diplomatic literature has emphasized confrontation with the U.S. as being at the root of the development of Cuban Communism (See, Lars Shoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Thomas Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). More recent literature has considered multiple causes of radicalization, for example Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Yet others have attempted to understand the social experience of radicalization, for example, Michelle Chase, Revolution Within a Revolution, and Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). I argue against the still prevailing notion that in its turn to communism, the revolution was “unquestionably betrayed,” (Theodore Draper, Castro’s Revolution, Myths and Realities (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962) asserting instead that Communist tendencies were indigenous to and inherent within the revolutionary process.
12 Recent studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba reveal the strength of the Communist Party in rural Cuba, and suggests that the move towards radicalization was assisted by the fruits of decades of radical organizing in these regions. See, Swanger, Rebel lands of Cuba; Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939 (London: Pluto Press, 2017); and Tony Wood, “Chapter 3: Another Country: Communism, Nationalism, and Black Self-Determination in Cuba, 1932–36,” in The Problem of the Nation in Latin America’s Second Age of Revolution: Transnational Debates on Sovereignty, Race and Class, 1923-1968, Ph.D. Dissertation (New York University, 2020).
13 Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) 233 and 250. See also Louis A. Pérez, Jr. “Politics, Peasants, and People of Color: The 1912 "Race War" in Cuba Reconsidered,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Aug., 1986), 509-539.
14 Wood, 7.
15 In their books, Devyn Spence-Benson (Anti-Racism in Cuba) and Joanna Swanger (Rebel Lands of Cuba) tackle this problem by identifying different levels and spaces of overt articulation of black identity.
16 Cubans employ multiple color terms: blanco, trigueño, mestizo, mulato, moreno, and negro, for example.
17 Surco, January 31, 1959, p.1.
18 Sara Kozameh, Harvest of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and the Making of Revolutionary Cuba, 1958-1970. Ph.D. Dissertation (New York University, 2020).
19 Revista ANAP, (August 1973) 4-7. Author’s translation. The last sentence has been paraphrased. The original in Spanish reads: “Claro, él no sabía que estaba hablando con un dirigente del Partido Socialista Popular de esa zona.” See, Juan B. Chongo, “Los recuerdos del congreso campesino en armas,” Revista ANAP [Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños (Cuba)] (August 1973): 10. A similar version of this account is published in an article I have written about the mobilization for agrarian reform during the insurgency in 1958, see Sara Kozameh, “Guerrillas, Peasants and Communists: Agrarian Reform in Cuba’s 1958 Liberated Territories,” The Americas: A Quarterly Journal of Latin American History, Vol 74, No 4 (October 2019), 641-673.
20 Ibid.
21 Specifically, in most municipalities of the Sierra Maestra and Sierra Cristal, blacks outnumbered whites. For more, see Swanger, Rebel Lands of Cuba, 100. For more on black migration and population rates in Oriente after Independence, see, Pérez, “Politics, Peasants, and People of Color.”
22 Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation.”
23 For statistical index on land tenancy by region, see República de Cuba, Ministerio de Agricultura, Memoria del Censo Agrícola Nacional, (Havana: P. Fernández y Cía, 1946).
24 This article builds on Joanna Swanger’s meticulously researched book Rebel Lands of Cuba, especially its sections on land struggles in the 1930s and their links to Communism and agrarian policy during the revolution.
25 Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba.
26 Pablo de la Torriente Brau. “Realengo 18.” La Jiribilla, Vol. 5 (December 2006).
27 “Reglamentos de Realengo 18,” page 31. Fondo Gobierno Provincial de Oriente, Legajo 1703, Expediente 5, Archivo Histórico Provincial Santiago de Cuba. I am grateful to Tony Wood for sharing these documents with me.
28 Telegram to Dr. Ángel Pérez Andre, Gobierno Provincial, sent August 20, 1943; and Telegram to Corononel Gonzalo Pérez, Governer of the Province, sent August 8, 1934. Fondo Gobierno Provincial de Oriente, Legajo 1703, Expediente 5, Archivo Histórico Provincial Santiago de Cuba.
29 Cabrera, Guillermo. Protagonistas del Realengo (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1972) 64.
30 Cabrera, Protagonistas, 73.
31 Quoted in the 1933 Manifiesto de Tiguabos reporced in part by Pablo de la Torriente Brau in “Realengo 18.” The slogan, “¡Por la posesión libre de la tierra para el que la trabaja!” was famously coined by Mexican agrarianist and revolutionary leader, Emiliano Zapata.
32 Guillermo Cabrera. Protagonistas del Relealengo, p. 38. Interviews to Alfredo Martínez, a CCP member who worked at Realengo 18. Lino Álvarez also met with Blas Roca and Severo Aguirre in 1934 in Havana.
33 Swanger, 37.
34 Cabrera, Protagonistas, 46; 62-65; and 73.
35 De la Torriente Brau, Realengo 18 and Josephine Herbst, “A Passport for the Realengo” The New Masses, July 16, 1935. For more on these reporters, see Alejandro de la Fuente and María de los Ángeles Merino, “Vigilar las tierras del Estado: El Realengo 18 y la cuestión agraria en la República,” in Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla (ed), Cuba: de colonia a república (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2006), and Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean.
36 Swanger, 43.
37 Swanger, 100-107.
38 Barry Carr, “Mill Occupations and Soviets: The Mobilisation of Sugar Workers in Cuba 1917-1933,” The Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 28, No.1 (Feb 1996), 129-158; Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990). See also Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean, Chapter 4; Swanger, Rebel Lands of Cuba; and Wood, “Chapter 3.”
39 Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation,” 83-116, and Tomás Fernández Robaina, El negro en Cuba, I902-I958: Apuntes para la historia de la lucha contra la discriminación racial (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1990), 134-48.
40 Swanger, 104.
41 Ibid.
42 The collaboration lasted from 1938-1952, after which the Party continued to suffer repression and was again outlawed. In 1940, the CCP won ten out of 162 congressional seats—with black labor leaders elected to four of those. See, Spence-Benson, Anti-Racism in Cuba, 92.
43 Wood, “Chapter 3,” 12-14.
44 De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 193.
45 Carr, (1996) 140.
46 Spence-Benson, 88.
47 For an excellent review of 1930s land struggles across the island, see Swanger, Rebel Lands of Cuba.
48 “Annex 3: Esbozo Biográfico Teodoro Pereira La Rosa,” Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente (Havana: Casa Editorial Verde Olivo, 2007), 98-102.
49 “Annex 2: Esbozo Biográfico Miguel Ángel Betancourt Rodríguez,” Comisión de Historia del Buró Agrario del Segundo Frente Oriental “Frank País.” Semilla Insurgente, 93.
50 Ibid.
51 Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente.
52 Author interview with Esther Cámbara Batista in El Cobre, Santiago Province, April 2017. I am indebted to historian Julio Corbea Calzado, for his work in helping facilitate this interview.
53 Known in Spanish as the Segundo Frente Oriental “Frank País.” Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente, 23 and 34.
54 Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente, 95.
55 Author interview with Esther Cámbara Batista in El Cobre, Santiago Province, April 2017. The historical record on the PSP’s involvement with the 26JM guerrillas has depicted the PSP as opportunistic for having first criticized the armed movement and then joined it just four months before the war was over. Historian Caridad Massón, however, has shown that the PSP was involved with the 26JM much earlier, in late 1957. See, Caridad Massón Sena, “El Partido Socialista Popular y la Revolución Cubana,” Revista Caliban (No. 7, April-June 2010). Meanwhile, on-the-ground accounts of the guerrilla war strongly suggest that PSP members were involved with the revolutionary movement unofficially since early 1957.
56 See, Asela de los Santos Tamayo, Con Visión de futuro: Testimonio de la Campaña Educativa, 1958, (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 1998). The Second Front was often referred to as the Estado Libre, or “Free State” of the Second Oriental Front, and ran its own departments of: Justice, Sanitation, Propaganda, Education, Construction, Finance and Industry.
57 Osvaldo Valdés García, Historia de la Reforma Agraria de Cuba (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2003), 44.
58 Ibid.
59 La Guerrillera translates in less consonant form to “the female guerrilla fighter.” Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente, 53.
60 Ovidio Cosme Díaz Benítez, “Romárico Cordero Garcés: El campesino líder (1899-1969), Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Agrícolas, vol 2, (October 2015), 448-449.
61 Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente, 53. See also, Kozameh, “Guerrillas, Peasants and Communists.”
62 Valdés, Historia de la, 43-47. My italics.
63 Valdés, Historia de la, 45, and Comisión, Semilla Insurgente, 37.
64 Revista ANAP, August 1973, 4-7. Caujerí and Las Cuchillas were, along with Realengo 18, the center of violent battles for land in the 1930s.
65 Nino Díaz, Memorias de un combatiente nacionalista cubano. Miami (2008). (No publisher information).
66 Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente, 56.
67 Comisión de Historia, Semilla Insurgente, 106. Annex 6 includes a full list of the delegates who attended the congress and the regions they represented.
68 Author interview, José Pineda, Santiago de Cuba, April 2017. The Juventud Socialista was the youth wing of the Communist Party.
69 Revista ANAP, August 1973, 11.
70 Raúl Castro Speech, Sept 21, 1958, in Comisión, Semilla Insurgente, Annex 8.
71 Diaz Castañón, María del Pilar. “We Demand, We Demand…”: Cuba, 1959: The Paradoxes of Year 1,” in The Revolution from Within: Cuba 1959-1980, (eds.) Michael Bustamante and Jennifer Lambe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
72 Author interview with Bonifacio Hernández, March 12, 2016.
73 INRA, Primer Forum Nacional de Reforma Agraria (Havana: INRA, 1959), 294.
74 Bianchi, Andrés. “Part 1: Agriculture,” in Dudley Seers (ed), Cuba: The Economic and Social Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).
75 Author interviews with: Michel Reyes-Trejo, April, 2017; Esther Cámbara Batista, April 2017; Berenice Acosta, February 2015; Benjamín Reyes, May 2017.
76 Enrique Atiénzar Rivero, “Teodoro Pereira, un hombre iluminado por la nobleza” Adelante, April 18, 2018. Accessed November 2019, http://www.adelante.cu/index.php/es/historia-incio/personalidades-submenu/12990-teodoro-pereira-un-hombre-iluminado-por-la-nobleza
77 Author interview with Esther Cámbara Batista in El Cobre, Santiago Province, April 2017.
78 Esther’s exact words in Spanish were, “Cómo esa campesina va a venir a dirigir aquí?”
79 Ibid.
80 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, El Cobre was a town populated almost entirely by royal slaves and manumitted free men of color. For more on the town’s history, see, María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) and Jalane Schmidt, Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba (Duke University Press, 2015).
81 Douglass Butterworth's ethnographic study of an urban slum similarly notes the persistence of racial and class tensions after 1959. Douglas, The People of Buena Ventura: Relocation of Slum Dwellers in Post-Revolutionary Cuba (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980).
82 Author interview with Esther Cámbara Batista in El Cobre, Santiago Province, April 2017.
83 Santiago Cardoso Arias, “En la Guerra en la Paz,” Revista INRA (December 1960), 56. The term “enthusiastically” need not be taken literally. At the time, it was commonly used to signal allegiance with the revolution and its leaders.
84 Cabrera, Protagonistas del Realengo, 62-65. My translation. Francisco’s last named is not mentioned. The book does not specify the exact year that the interview took place. My translation. Spanish original reads: “…nosotros hacíamos junta y nos regábamos por el monte, con machete y palo, para vigilar a los trocheros de la compañía, que querían divider el Realengo. Y le ganamos la batalla a la compañía y tuvieron que dejarnos tranquilos. Luego, cuando la guerra, ayudamos en todo para ganarles también otra pelea más grande. Ya ve usted, la tierra es nuestra, ganada y mantenida.”
85 Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean.
86 Although he uses the term santero, Pablo is referring to the Haitian religion of Vodou, not Cuban Santería. For more on Haitian-Cuban Vodou, support for it from the Cuban state, and details about Pablo’s own religious practice, see Grette Viddal, “Vodú Chic: Haitian Religion and the Folkloric Imaginary in Socialist Cuba,” New West Indian Guide, Vol. 86, No 3/4 (2012), 205-235.
87 His exact words were, “Eran socialistas, todos nosotros eramos Fidelistas.”