The Cuban Revolution

This account starts in eighteen ninety eight, when the United States wrote itself the right to invade Cuba, and to keep a naval base at Guantanamo, into the new republic's own constitution.

By the nineteen fifties, American investors controlled the sugar, the utilities, and the mines, and Havana had become a casino town run in partnership with organized crime. Batista's coup, welcomed in Washington, confirmed that elections would be allowed only when they produced the right result.

The Moncada attack you just heard was the spark. The twenty sixth of July Movement that grew from it was a broad national front against a torturer, not a Soviet plot, and Che Guevara's theory of a small guerrilla band igniting a whole country was proof the conditions were ripe.

The embargo and the invasion at the Bay of Pigs are read here as an empire trying to take back what it had already lost, and the alliance with Moscow as the consequence of that hostility, not its cause. Cuban troops later fought at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, and Cuban doctors went to dozens of countries. Here is how Che Guevara put the case for the fighter himself.

This account holds that the revolution was stolen. Many of the people who fought Batista, and many more who cheered his fall, wanted the nineteen forty constitution restored and free elections held.

Instead, Castro postponed those elections indefinitely and absorbed or crushed the other factions that had fought beside him. The judge he installed as president, Manuel Urrutia, was forced out within seven months.

In nineteen fifty nine, revolutionary tribunals sent hundreds of Batista's police and soldiers to the wall, many after summary trials broadcast as spectacle, the executions at La Cabana fortress overseen by Che Guevara. Property was seized without compensation. Independent newspapers were shut.

Then came the departures. Fourteen thousand children flown out alone under Operation Pedro Pan. A hundred twenty five thousand people crossing the Florida Straits from the port of Mariel in nineteen eighty. Each wave, in this account, is the population voting with its own body.

Armando Valladares spent twenty two years in a Cuban prison for his beliefs. This is how his own memoir opens.

For the rural poor of eastern Cuba, the revolution is measured by what arrived after nineteen fifty nine. Before it, roughly forty percent of adults in the countryside could not read, and the great estates holding the best land were owned in large part by American corporations.

The Agrarian Reform Law gave title to roughly two hundred thousand peasant families. Then, in nineteen sixty one, the government suspended the school year and sent more than two hundred fifty thousand volunteers into the mountains and cane fields with lanterns and primers, cutting illiteracy toward the single digits in eight months.

Cuba built rural clinics and a national health service and trained doctors by the tens of thousands. By some measures, infant mortality fell below the United States.

Here is what one volunteer in that literacy campaign, unnamed in the record, remembered being taught.

From Washington, this is the story of a Soviet foothold ninety miles from Florida. The United States had backed Batista, then recognized Castro's government within days of his victory, largely accepting Herbert Matthews's portrait of a democratic reformer.

The disillusion came fast: the executions of nineteen fifty nine, the postponed elections, and the seizure of an estimated one billion dollars in American owned property in nineteen sixty, without the compensation international law required.

When Cuba signed with the Soviet Union and Washington cut the sugar quota, Havana nationalized the American refineries that refused to process Soviet crude. The embargo followed in October. The Bay of Pigs followed in April.

John Kennedy had already named the threat on the campaign trail, a year before he had to answer for it.

Eighteen months after that failed invasion, Soviet missiles were found on the island, and that is a different broadcast.

Academic scholarship since the nineteen nineties tries to hold both ledgers open at once. Marifeli Perez-Stable locates the revolution's roots in Cuba's dependent sugar economy, and argues its radicalism was real and popular before it hardened into a Soviet dependent state.

Samuel Farber argues the authoritarian outcome was a choice made by the leadership, not simply a reaction to American pressure. Louis Perez places the whole story inside a century of asymmetry between the two countries, running back to that same eighteen ninety eight intervention.

Aviva Chomsky sets the gains, literacy, health care, and the UMAP labor camps that interned gay men and religious believers, side by side, and argues that neither cancels the other.

Human Rights Watch documented the same period from the outside. By twenty twenty five, independent monitors counted more than one thousand political prisoners still on the island.

The scholars also note that Cuba in nineteen fifty nine was not the poorest country in Latin America. It already had high literacy and health numbers for the region, which complicates the purest version of both stories.

Marifeli Perez-Stable put the core of her own argument this way.