47-year-old memories of Cuba

By Weekly Archive On Oct 17, 2007

I
first visited Cuba in early June 1960, about a year after the First
Agrarian Reform Law (May 1959) called for the confiscation of the
island’s largest farms and estates.

On
June 6, 1960, just after I arrived, the Cuban government demanded
that the managers of U.S.-owned oil refineries (Texaco and Esso) and
the British-owned Shell refine Soviet crude oil. The U.S. government
instructed the refinery owners to refuse the demand. On June 28, Cuba
nationalized the refineries.

On
the street, worried middle class members predicted such disobedience
would induce the empire to act with force. The exodus to the United
States accelerated.

On
July 6, President Dwight D. Eisenhower retaliated by cutting off
Cuba’s sugar quota. “Sin
cuota pero sin amo,” read one sign (No quota, but no boss.) “No
quota, but no asshole,” chided Guillermo Cabrera Infante. (He
directed Lunes
de Revolucion,
a weekly cultural supplement. He served as cultural attaché in
Belgium before defecting in 1965).

A
raucous demonstration of telephone workers dumped a coffin marked
AT&T into the sea. Students and workers of both sexes held
frequent demonstrations to show support for their revolution which
began to resemble a metaphorical snowball plummeting down the
mountain, gaining speed and depth.

Each
day, I would read of new factories being “intervened,” the step
preceding nationalization. A worker would report illegal procedures.
The state would send an “interventor,” who would “discover”
evidence of illegality. The firm would become nationalized.

By
summer 1960, a joke dramatized the speed of Cuba’s socialist
transformation — although the word was still officially taboo. A man
calls a factory, asks to speak to the interventor. The receptionist
says: “But this factory hasn’t been intervened.”

“OK,”
the caller replies, “I’ll call back in five minutes.”

On
August 6, Revolucion
reported all U.S. commercial properties on the island had been
nationalized. A friend phoned me at my cheap hotel. His father had
owned a string of supermarkets and his plush Havana apartment was no
longer of use to him. Did I want to stay there?

You
bet. The Jamaican maids — “they come with the apartment,” my
friend informed me — reported the daily gossip. Both hated
communism, which “gave power to the worthless poor” and
identified with the “nice people with money” who thought Batista
had imposed the kind of order they “could respect.”

“Socialism
means you can’t buy shrimp at the store.” one quipped, referring
to the shortage of consumer goods as the U.S. stopped its trade and
merchants had their stores nationalized. (By 1962, that apartment
became part of a complex for housing thousands of Soviet advisers.)

In
mid September, Fidel went to New York to address the UN General
Assembly. Before he left, Cuba nationalized U.S.-owned banks
including First National City Bank of New York and Chase Manhattan.

The
revolutionary government had already nationalized big hotels,
renaming the Havana Hilton “Habana Libre.” Cuba had earlier
seized United Fruit and King Ranch holdings as well as large
Cuban-owned property, like the Bacardi Rum factories. Heady stuff for
a young socialist like myself!

In
October 1960, 47 years ago, I left Cuba on the last scheduled ferry
from Havana to Key West — just as the government passed the 1960
Urban Reform Law that nationalized commercially owned real estate and
eliminated landlords.

During
the eight hour ride, I chatted with middle class Cubans who decided
to abandon their homes and leave the island after losing their
businesses.

“The
Communists have taken over,” Jorge, a middle aged doctor and clinic
owner told me. “We thought Fidel was reasonable, but he only wants
to communize the island, take everything I worked so hard for and
give it to lazy people. This is not patriotism. It’s
Marxist-Leninism like he spouted at the UN. The Russians will soon be
here with their armies.”

He
referred to Fidel’s September UN General Assembly address in which
he documented U.S.-based terrorist attacks that cost Cuban lives and
destroyed property. How would the UN preserve the rights of small
countries to choose their destinies “when their rights have been
denied and aggressive forces are marshaled against them?”

Martha,
Jorge’s wife, a chemist, who worked in a laboratory they also
owned, dismissed as “exaggeration” the revolution’s
“accomplishments.” Fidel had boasted of building 10,000 new
schools and 5,000 new houses and sending tens of thousands of
students leaving home to go to the countryside to teach peasants to
read and write.

She
and Jorge talked bitterly of their teenage son — age 17 — who had
stayed behind to “fight for the revolution.” In tears, Martha
almost screeched: “They stole him from me.” Indeed, I had spoken
to a rebellious teenage girl whose parents refused to let her go to
the campo to “alphabetize” the illiterate. She and her parents
understood that this meant loss of control — of her virginity — to
the revolution.

At
the UN, Castro had reported on a major loss as well, some $500
million dollars stolen by “the politicians who had enriched
themselves during the tyranny of Batista.”

“We
hated Batista but we never imagined Fidel would turn on his own class
and confiscate our property, the basis of civilization. The United
States will not allow this.”

Fidel
had questioned the U.S. “right to promote and encourage subversion
in our country.” Fidel, the lawyer, asked: “Does the Government
of the United States feel it has the right to promote subversion on
our country, violating all international treaties?”

The
answer? For empire, might makes right. Cuban workers, mobilized by
their government, had thrown down the gauntlet. They seized U.S.
property and then defied the “imperialists” to do something about
it. A revolution began as anti-Batista. It turned quickly into a
class and anti-imperialist struggle in which the propertied
opposition lost their political parties, mass media and other public
outlets.

By
summer of 1960, members of the propertied classes, who had assumed
their social prerogatives as axioms, saw the collapse of their
culture. Instead, “the masses” as Fidel referred to the workers
and peasants of Cuba in his speeches, had taken the initiative and
usurped the status and honorific deference previously enjoyed by
those of wealth.

In
his UN speech as in his long discourses in Cuba, Fidel cast his lot
with the downtrodden. The words of his UN speech were dwarfed in U.S.
headlines to the spectacle of Fidel and the Cuban delegation kicked
out of the Shelburne Hotel in mid town and moving to the Hotel
Theresa in Harlem. The pretext was that Cubans had plucked their own
chicken before cooking them in the hotel room, a silly fib repeated
endlessly by the U.S. press. But his stay in Harlem, with a
well-publicized visit from a friendly Malcolm X, accurately reflected
the sharp leftward direction of the Cuban government.

On
the grim ferry ride, those I spoke to felt confident the United
States would react to “communism” on the island it virtually
owned until 1959. Then, they would return and resume their middle
class lives. Indeed, the rumor had become deafening that the CIA was
training exiled Cubans to invade.

By
the time I returned to Cuba in December 1960, every Cuban awaited the
U.S. invasion. The covert CIA training of thousands of Cuban exile
men in Guatemala had become the world’s worst kept secret. The only
questions that remained were: when and where would the invasion come
and how much U.S. military involvement would support it?

On
January 2, 1961, I watched an impassioned and determined Fidel from
about forty feet away. He denounced the U.S. Embassy as a nest of
spies and demanded that Washington reduce its staff from 87 Americans
and 120 Cubans to 11, the number of Cubans working at its Embassy in
Washington. The million people assembled in Revolution Plaza exploded
in applause and chants.

“Fidel
seguro, a los Yankis, dales duro.” (“Right
on Fidel, Give the Yankees hell.”)

Eisenhower
responded. “There is a limit to what the United States in
self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached.” On
January 3, he broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. New
York Times
columnist James Reston complemented Ike, who “told off his
tormentors and slammed the door on his way out. It was a grand exit
which made the pictures dance on the wall and rattled old Fidel’s
back teeth, and this country obviously loved it.” (January 5, 1961)

In
my mail box at the Hotel Riviera I discovered a note from a U.S.
Embassy staffer advising me to leave Cuba. The Embassy could “no
longer protect” me. From my window, I saw the U.S. Embassy staff
pack and leave. I walked to get a closer view on that chilly winter
day (55 degrees?). The departing personnel looked grin. They knew an
invasion was imminent.

I
drove west into Pinar del Rio. Cuban militia teams planted explosives
under bridges. Teenagers in militia uniforms hoisted Czech-made anti
aircraft guns onto the mezzanine roof of the Riviera. I returned to
Miami two months before Kennedy authorized the CIA to send Cuban
exiles to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow. His new book is A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
His new film is WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE
(Contact roundworldproductions@gmail.com).