Cuba's Counter-Revolution

...Owners, excepting those convicted of war crimes, have been promised compensation in the form of twenty-year, four and one-half per cent bonds which, however, INRA has failed to distribute...

...They realize that some type of land reform was long overdue...

...Last July, Jose Pardo Llada, the popular Fidelista news commentator, barely escaped a machine-gun attack...

...For them, Cuba's future under Castro is unmitigatedly dark...

...in September, about one year, compared with a few days a year ago...

...there is no question that the Cuban masses are still behind the revolutionary government — despite the mass anti-Castro hysteria in the United States, and press reports to the contrary...

...More important, if the economy reveals weaknesses on which the bourgeoisie can capitalize...

...Moreover, at some future date, perhaps sooner than the planners expect, Cuba will run out of idle capacity...

...As a result, few are willing to take the trouble to witness the transformation of the countryside at first hand...

...In the first case, however, Castro may be compelled to take repressive political measures to enforce future expropriations of Cuban-owned enterprises...

...Second, new workers' housing, schools, hospitals, transport facilities, even beaches, motels, and restaurants, are the fruit of a complete reallocation of the island's construction resources from the private to the public sector...

...This control, an old and well-documented story, naturally carried over into the island's political life...

...banks and manufacturers have run large sectors of the Cuban economy from a distance...

...While some day laborers have had their hours of work reduced as much as thirty-five per cent, and others have enjoyed modest increases in wages, improvements in their over-all material condition have been spotty and insufficient...

...Up to now, their opposition inside Cuba has been limited to black market operations, heated denunciations of the regime in the privacy of their own homes, and a long-faced, passive hostility in public...

...For the moment, the only realistic attitude among a middle-class bereft of allies is "wait-and-see...

...Middle-class resistance to the Castro regime can be attributed to one other source: unwillingness to acknowledge the positive aspects of the revolution's reform measures...

...The fortunes of the urban workers have been closely bound up with private enterprise...

...the first bottleneck will probably be the labor supply...

...Between these two positions—one hesitates to call them extremes since the views of both men run against those of the Cuban masses—lies that of the representative middle-class Cuban...

...In addition, over-specialization in sugar has deprived the island of secondary and satellite industries, together with the class of small businessmen necessary to their operation...

...There are petty opportunists in the government, but they are isolated either physically or ideologically...

...Washington's hostility has in the past toppled Cuban governments...

...At mass meetings, one no longer sees middle-class representation...

...as a result, in terms of wages and employment, many have shared their employers' economic distress...

...When the full truth is brought home (and this will occur in the near future), they will no longer acquiesce in Castro's daily decrees...

...For example, one otherwise astute lawyer insisted that the sugar workers had always been within reach of satisfactory medical care...

...Hence, in the event of economic collapse, the revolutionary government would have to contend with an authentic resistance movement at home, together with an external threat of growing proportions...

...He argued that Castro's policy of sending all new medical school graduates (who numbered 305 in the last class) to the dispensaries on the cooperatives for a six-month tour is solely a political move designed to placate an undisciplined peasantry...

...Conditioned by a long collaboration with the opportunists in Batista's police state, in addition to being temporarily isolated, the bourgeoisie have been powerless to thwart the revolution...

...Yet at least until now, Castro has been able to count all three groups in his camp...

...its middlemen by government functionaries...

...This was not the fantasy of the medical cadre...

...it can be reapportioned only once...

...Middle-class consumers complain incessantly of shortages, and non-essential businesses dependent on raw material imports have shut down...

...However, apart from Miami's Moviemento de Recuperacion Revolucionaria, begun a few months ago by disaffected Fi-delistas, and New York's Rosa Blanca, organized by exiled Batista "moderates" early in 1959, the opposition has no political instrument and is therefore harmless—at least from the point of view of forging a coherent resistance...

...investors had monopolized electric power (American and Foreign Power Company), communications (International Telephone and Telegraph), and chemicals (Freeport Sulphur...

...To be sure, they oppose Castro now, but they must be classed as "moderates...

...The entire market complex has been superseded by the state...

...What can be viewed as a sort of class guilt has conditioned their response to the entire range of revolutionary political and economic measures...

...As for the others among the opposition, outwardly at least they are complying with the revolution's orders and decrees...

...Even now, it is too late for the national bourgeoisie as a whole to come to terms with the revolution...

...And a trip to the "interior" for the Habanero assumes an importance all out of proportion to the actual distances and discomforts involved...

...Sharing in the material rewards of capitalist development, they have rarely held, nor could they aspire to, the really important seats of economic power...

...Ultimately, they will be integrated with the cooperatives and the industrial labor force...

...Moreover, tourism is at a standstill...

...O'Connor has written for a number of publications, including The Nation, The New Republic, and Dissent.—The Editors...

...The United States would undoubtedly use these developments as a justification for stepping up its offensive against the revolution...

...Later in the summer, the head of Castro's secret police, after reportedly infiltrating a counter-revolutionary cell, was betrayed and shot to death...

...What exactly does he think, and what is he likely to do about it...

...this was not the case as late as last spring...

...A large segment of the urban middle-classes are informed about working-class life only by their own servants, or by hotel workers and taxi drivers—precisely those elements one would expect to equate their interests with those of their employers—and are therefore misled as to the revolution's true accomplishments...

...As a result, the conservatism, the sense of responsibility and permanence, the idea of the "long-view," all so characteristic of the U.S...

...As for the farm owner-operators, while they are now assured of markets and transportation facilities, INRA has revealed a willingness to expropriate their independence, if not their lands...

...Yet by reason of its formlessness and disjointedness, it can accommodate extremists of every stamp, including terrorists...

...It must be stressed that the Cuban middle-classes have never led an existence independent of United States' economic interests on the island...

...To begin with, the first essential of agrarian reform was purchase or expropriation of all landholdings more than 995 acres in size (in sugar, rice, and cattle-raising the official limit is 3,316 acres, although in practice it is 1,500 acres...

...Additionally, they may be able to count on the help of many farm owner-operators (of whom there are roughly fifty thousand in Cuba) whose economic independence has been eroded by Agrarian Reform Institute's (INRA) controls...

...More than half a million acres were owned by a single combine, the American Sugar Refining Company...

...For fifty years, Cuban society has been decrepit and decadent...

...Anyone who predicts the future of Cuba, he wrote flatly, is a fool...

...He can convert their intransigence into a domestic enemy to consolidate further his hold on the rural masses...

...What are the sources of this class guilt...

...How viable will the new economy be...

...Thousands of people dependent on the old system have been affected: not only the owners themselves, who number fewer than 3,000, but also land agents, commodity brokers, distributors, and money lenders...

...E DONT WANT t0 concede any-" thing more," the Cuban lawyer said...

...I don't know, perhaps it is necessary now...

...The sources of middle-class discontent are two-fold...

...Material wealth devoid of political power has shaped the lives of Havana's rich and near-rich into a kind of night-club nihilism...

...Politically homeless, they do not as yet figure prominently in counter-revolutionary politics...

...The visitor to Cuba cannot escape the fact that a large portion of the Havana bourgeoisie is unbelievably ignorant of the changes which have come about in the lives of the farm worker, the tenant, the sharecropper, and the guajiro (the landless agricultural wage worker...

...Once this stage in Cuba's development is reached, any permanent improvement in the material condition of the urban worker must await planned industrialization on a broad scale, a long-run affair...

...During newsreels in middle-class cinemas, the Pope, President Eisenhower, or even MGM's lion win far more applause than Premier Castro, who is more likely to be booed...

...The students, while divided among themselves, remain pro-Castro...

...The country prosecutors and judges are nearly all Fidelistas...

...How authoritarian the island's political life will become—and given the political style of the Cuban bourgeoisie, it is difficult to be optimistic about this question—depends on the specific forms the opposition takes...

...Until now, the government's economic accomplishments have deprived the middle-classes of allies...

...Hence a serious failure in the economy could transform the passive support of these important classes into a passive hostility...

...It will be recalled that the attitude of a large, but unknown, portion of the middle-classes is ambivalent...

...Hence the pattern of colonial investment divested Cuba of still another source of social and political stability—a strong and viable national bourgeoisie...

...Inescapable in this shift—a minor revolution in itself—is a severe cutback in private building, a halt to speculative profits in urban real estate, underemployment among lawyers, accountants, material dealers, and others whose livelihood was directly or indirectly bound up in private construction...

...For instance, in Cuba Libre, a cooperative in Matanzas province, everyone had suffered from hookworm or one of the deficiency diseases before the doctor arrived last February...

...Yet, there may be reasons to regard this view as unrealistic...

...This cannot be expected to go unchecked by Castro's police...

...In that event, if the solidarity of the Cuban working people is undermined, the government machinery, resting as it does on the will of the people, might be rendered helpless...

...In the event the middle-class should adapt itself to the revolution—at the moment only a remote possibility— Castro must discover a way to inhibit the revolution's left-wing, whose influence at home—thanks to the United States' disastrous Cuban policy—is far out of proportion to its actual numbers...

...How pronounced is middle-class discontent...

...As of October, the government had taken possession of roughly seventy per cent of all lands under cultivation or in pasture and forests...

...On the other hand, if in the unlikely event they adapt themselves to the exigencies of the revolution (as have the private building contractors, for example), he can revive private commerce and enlarge the scope of the free-market sector to ease the burden of planned economic development...

...if, that is, the middle-classes win allies, the United States will undoubtedly accelerate its diplomatic, economic, and indirect military offensive against the revolutionary government...

...Third, in line with the government's policy of diversifying agriculture, producing import substitutes, and developing a wide range of exports to reduce Cuba's dependence on sugar, the National Bank has introduced a system of exchange rationing and import licensing (still necessary despite our export embargo since it will be relatively simple to re-export U.S...

...Of course Castro has turned a popular movement into a dictatorship...

...And it is beyond the power of even a man with the drive and appeal of Fidel Castro to win over a class whose extinction he himself is authoring...

...As a result, the middle-classes, ready with leadership and purpose, might find valuable allies...

...But a sustained rise in real income can be brought about only by enlarging the national income pie...

...An economist at Barnard College, Mr...

...These two questions are of utmost importance for Cuba...

...A Vedado party or an afternoon of cafe solos in the garden of one of Country Club's mansions is incomplete without a round of the latest anti-government stories...

...Yet, so long as the middle-classes continue to be repudiated by the vast majority of Cuba's six and a half million people (of which the bourgeoisie number less than half a million), Castro will profit by their response to his drive toward planned industrialization of the island...

...The reason for this is simple...

...First and most important, the Cuban bourgeoisie have, inevitably, suffered economically...

...Yet, since this discontent, which is increasingly apparent among even anti-Batista elements who worked actively for the revolution, is grotesquely exaggerated in the United States' mass media and studiously ignored in the Cuban press, the range and modes of middle-class attitudes are not easily accessible...

...either would tend to undermine the revolution's solidarity and test its coherence and staying power...

...It was in the United States where the primary products were processed and sold (sugar refining is the obvious example...

...Many non-socialists employed by the government itself, including doctors, technicians, and administrators, will at that point attempt to arrest Castro's excesses...

...The flow of luxury consumer goods has been choked off...

...The first major offensive against the national bourgeoisie in October (when almost four hundred Cuban-owned banks, industrial, commercial and transportation concerns were nationalized) appears to have accelerated counterrevolutionary activity inside Cuba...

...Since the government has assumed the role of monopoly importer, two thousand of Havana's customs brokers employing about four thousand clerks have closed their doors...

...In the hostility of the urban bourgeoisie— those ex-rentiers, businessmen, professionals, and tradesmen who are now—privately—fiercely anti-government—lies the only current internal threat to Premier Fidel Castro's rule...

...Better off in absolute terms, their lot has probably been impaired compared with that of the cooperativistas...

...in that of the rural wage-worker, on a continuing rise in agricultural productivity...

...As the chastening effect of middle-class guilt is diluted by the impact of the government's single-minded drive toward a centrally-planned economy, the opposition will grow in number and gain in coherence and intensity...

...One important reason is that Castro has profited immeasurably from the former extreme inequalities in Cuba's distribution of income combined with the enormous amount of unused economic capacity (before the revolution, roughly fifty per cent of Cuba's arable land lay idle...

...Subsequent articles will explore the Cuban economy and planning program and assess American foreign policy toward Cuba and the revolutionary government...

...It is important to recall that the middle-classes are small in numbers compared to the total Cuban population...

...And agrarian reform—which has yielded nearly 2,500 producer's cooperatives extending over forty per cent of Cuba's farm lands, and more than 7,000 individual titles to lands previously worked by tenants, sharecroppers, and squatters (covering about twenty-five per cent of all farm lands)—is the sine qua non of the revolution...

...middle-classes, do not find a place in Cuban bourgeois ideology...

...They have submitted to the intervention and expropriation of private business, and have yielded their lands in the interior to militant INRA cadres...

...And, most important of all, the answer depends on whether the overall economy holds up under the strains and tensions imposed on it by the revolutionary planners and by the economic warfare against Cuba to which the United States has reverted...

...They are surprised that the regime can function with a minimum of physical coercion and an absence of police torture...

...A coherent image fails to materialize even after scores of conversations...

...And when there is a fighting unit on the streets, I'll join it...

...A large portion of the university faculty is quietly anti-Castro, but they have been frustrated by the Student Federation...

...the businessman, the lawyer, the tradesman, unsure of themselves, invariably invite caution...

...rather it was verified by my traveling companions, who were themselves doctors, after an examination of the patients' records...

...I don't mind my own predicament"—this is a standard response—"but Castro isn't doing the ordinary person any good either...

...Moreover, the middle-classes have no allies in the police or army...

...The profound economic changes brought about by the revolutionary government have been accompanied —and to a large extent made possible —by a wholesale redistribution of the nation's wealth, which has reduced the living standard of the middle-classes...

...its approval has been sufficient to sustain unpopular regimes...

...two invasions mounted from Florida have already been thwarted...

...While some production decisions are shared by INRA and the members of the cooperatives themselves, the Institute (which will spend $160 million in 1960) supplies equipment, fertilizer, and technical personnel, and then purchases, transports, and sells the crop...

...That is when our people will wake up...

...In addition, the middle-classes— particularly the moderates—still do not appear to comprehend the full implications of the revolution...

...If these questions are disregarded, all forecasts of the island's future forfeit their right to a serious hearing...

...For all that, from three classes— which among them undoubtedly make up a majority of Cuba's population of six million—Castro lays claim to only passive support in the sense of a continuing commitment to the revolution...

...Concessions or restraints would be unavoidable...

...And—aside from those whose livelihood depends on tourism, personal servants, and the like—at the moment they command no support among other classes...

...Yet the members of the cooperatives, making up roughly half of all farm workers, are the main beneficiaries of agrarian reform and a rationalized agriculture...

...dominated mining, metals, oil, fruits, and light industry...

...These factors combined with an extraordinary flair for self-dramatization and a great potential for violence—demonstrated time and time again—will in the opinion of many soon elicit an open terroristic opposition to Castro's government...

...These are the urban working-class, the town-dwelling agricultural wage workers, and the farm owners small enough to have been bypassed by expropriation decrees...

...But believe me when I say that a revolution was both desirable and inevitable...

...They are impressed with the government's honesty in the handling of public funds (the new budget which will be made public shortly, the Planning Board's first accomplishment, is Cuba's first since 1937...

...While they add prestige to opposition claims, by virtue of their "moderation" they have no means of expression, since they do not want to be considered active counter-revolutionaries, nor do they feel at ease with the extremists...

...There is no independent army to inhibit the revolution's left-wing (as in Venezuela), nor is there a residual lati-fundia or important property-owning peasantry to brake the revolution's momentum (as in Mexico...

...six months ago there remained the possibility that the trade associations, professional groups, and chambers of commerce could integrate themselves into it...

...commodities from Mexico and other Latin American countries...

...Almost forty per cent of Cuba's sugar cane output, for example, was processed in thirty U.S.-owned refineries...

...an urban practice was far too lucrative...

...The economic condition of the second group has unquestionably improved...

...This policy is designed partially to conserve foreign exchange, but mainly to control indirectly the pattern of the island's production and distribution...

...But we must tolerate Castro a while longer...

...hotel, bar, restaurant, and taxi owners, a sizable class in Havana, have become increasingly infected with the politics of counter-revolution...

...Acts of extremism appear to be confined chiefly to voluntary exiles mobilizing in Florida for a series of military thrusts against the island's sparsely populated mountain districts...

...Soon the Cuban economy will be wholly dependent on the Communists, and the government will no longer be able to follow an independent policy...

...Perhaps the best rough measure of middle-class disaffection is the necessary waiting time for a United States' visa as a result of mounting demand...

...Amazingly enough, they do not understand that what they are witnessing is revolutionary socialism and that as a result they are finished as a class...

...The lawyer's companion was more sanguine—surprisingly so, since the National Bank's new tariff and foreign exchange policies had compelled him to abandon his importing business...

...Castro's most avid opponents among the intellectuals are older men, who have spent a lifetime in politics...

...The new class of farm owner-operators (former tenants, sharecroppers, and squatters) are wholly loyal to the revolution...

...The greater Castro's internal opposition, the less will be the prospect that the United States will withhold direct and unembarrassed support from anti-Castro exiles in this country...

...few repercussions inside Cuba accompanied nationalization of United States' investments, but there is some evidence that the Cuban businessman will not be as compliant as his American counterpart...

...Ray Brennan put it more bluntly when he closed his book, Cuba, Castro, and Justice, with a judgment everyone in the middle-classes to whom I spoke was willing to concede...

...Redistribution of wealth in the direction of greater equality has tended to raise per capita income, mainly in the form of goods and services consumed in common (housing, health, and educational facilities, for the most part...

...The well-to-do in Havana are largely blinded by a mindless urban provincialism...

...it is significant, for example, that in place of the word "country," or "rural district," the exotic phrase, "the interior," is common usage...

...Yet the truth is that few doctors had been willing to set foot on the countryside...

...left-over Batista elements have been completely swept away...

...Nonetheless, if the island's economy should take a serious turn for the worse, there seems little doubt that Castro's enemies could claim the support of the urban working-class, or a large portion of it, together with that of the many town-dwelling agricultural wage workers whose condition has been virtually unaffected by agrarian reform...

...Whether the bourgeoisie can transform their own hostility into a coherent and effective opposition therefore depends on potential working-class support, and a de facto alliance with the United States government, which, in turn, hinges on Cuba's economic future...

...The attitude of others, though— the man who termed the old system as "decrepit" is an example—is not wholly unambivalent...