Open Veins of Latin America Page 10

  Cuban sugar historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals describes with eloquent data the headlong advance of sugar in the years following the British occupation, Spain's commercial monopoly had in fact been blown apart, and all brakes on the entry of slaves had been removed. The sugarmills absorbed everything, men and land. To the mills went shipyard and foundry workers and the countless small artisans who had contributed decisively to the development of industry. Small peasants growing tobacco in the vegas or fruit in the orchards, victims now of the canefields' brutally destructive advance, also turned to sugar production. Extensive planting relentlessly reduced the soil's fertility; sugarmill towers multiplied in the Cuban countryside and each one needed more and more land. Fire devoured tobacco vegas, forests, and pasturelands.

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  Dried meat, a Cuban export a few years earlier, was by 1792 arriving in large quantities from abroad and was an import from then on.( The Rio de la Plata meatpacking plants were already in operation. Argentina and Uruguay (then without separate existence and not so named) had adopted their economies to the massive export of dried and salted meat, hides, fats, and tallows. Brazil and Cuba, the nineteenth century's two great slave centers, were fine markets for dried meat, a very cheap food easily transported and warehoused since it did not go bad in the tropical heat. Cuba was the first market for Uruguayan meat--then shipped in thin, dry slices--at the end of the eighteenth century. Cubans still call dried meat "Montevideo," but Uruguay stopped selling it to Cuba in 1985 when they joined the OAS anti-Cuban bloc, thus idiotically losing their last market for the product.6) The shipyard and foundry languished, tobacco production plummeted; the slaves of sugar put in a workday of up to twenty hours. On smoking lands the "sugarocracy"

  consolidated its power. In the late eighteenth century euphoria of sky-high international prices, speculation ran riot: land prices went up twenty times in Guines; in Havana, eight times the legal rate of interest was paid; and throughout Cuba the fees for baptisms, burials, and masses rose in proportion to the soaring prices of blacks and oxen.

  Early chroniclers told of traveling across all of Cuba in the shade of giant palms and through leafy forests abounding in mahogany, cedar, and ebony.

  Cuba's precious woods may still be admired in the tables and window frames of the Escorial and in the doors of the royal palace in Madrid, but in Cuba the sugarcane invasion sent the best virgin forests up in smoke. In the same years it was destroying its own timberlands, Cuba became the chief purchaser of U.S.

  timber. The extensive plunder-culture of sugarcane meant not only the death of the forest but also, in the long run, the death of the island's fabulous fertility.

  (Until recently, palanqueros operated on the Rio Sagua. According to Fraginals, "They carry a long pole with an iron tip. With this they prod the riverbed until they strike a piece of wood....

  Thus, day after day, they bring up from the river the remains of the trees that sugar felled. They live from the corpses of the forest." )With forests surrendered to the flames, erosion soon did its work on the defenseless soil and thousands of streams dried up.

  The present-day per hectare yield from sugar plantations in Cuba is more than three times lower than in Peru and four and one-half times lower than in Hawaii. Irrigation and fertilization of the land are priority tasks for the Cuban Revolution. Large and small hydraulic dams are multiplying, 68

  fields are being irrigated, and fertilizer is being scattered over lands weak from centuries of punishment.

  The "sugarocracy" piled up their fraudulent fortunes while reinforcing Cuba's dependence. Among those who savagely devastated Cuba's fertile soil were persons of refined European culture who could spot a genuine Brueghel and afford to buy it; they returned from frequent Paris trips with Etruscan vases and Greek amphorae, Gobelin tapestries and Ming screens, landscapes and portraits by the most fashionable British artists. I was startled to find in the kitchen of a Havana mansion an enormous strongbox with a secret combination in which a countess used to protect her table service. Up until 1959 it was not factories, but sugar castles that were built on the island: sugar installed and removed dictators, gave or denied jobs to workers, decided the rhythm of the "dance of the millions"--the 1919-1921 boom period--and of the terrible crises.

  The city of Trinidad is today a resplendent corpse. It collapsed, never to rise again, with the collapse of sugar prices in 1857.( Fraginals has perceptively noted that the names of sugar estates started in the nineteenth century reflected the rise and fall of the sugar curve: "Hope" "New Hope" "Audacious,"

  "Gamble": "Hopeful, "Conquest," "Confidence," Good Results": "Wit's End," "Woe,"

  "Disenchantment." There were four estates named-- with premonition-- "Disenchantment.") In the mid-nineteenth century it had forty sugarmills producing 700,000 arrobas of sugar. Poor tobacco-farming peasants had been displaced by force and violence, and meat for the district--which had also raised cattle and had once exported meat--was being bought abroad. There was a flowering of colonial-style palaces with furtively shadowed porticos, chandeliers dripping crystal in high-ceilinged salons, Persian carpets, minuets faintly breaking the velvet silence, ormolu mirrors reflecting the graces of buckle-shod, bewigged caballeros. Great marble and stone skeletons, proud silent bell towers, and Spanish carriages invaded by grass remain today as testimony to all this.

  Trinidad became known as "the city of the 'hads'" because its white survivors always talked of past days when they "had" power and glory.

  When the Sierra Maestra guerrilleros took power, Cuba's destiny was still tied to sugar prices. "A people that entrusts its subsistence to one product alone commits suicide," the national hero Jose Marti' had prophesied. When sugar stood at $.22 a pound in 1920, Cuba beat the world record in per capita export-

  -even surpassing England--and had

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  Latin America's highest per capita income. But in December of that year the price fell to $.04 and a crisis of hurricane force descended in 1921: many sugarmills went bankrupt--to be bought up by U.S. interests--as did all the Cuban and Spanish banks, including the Banco Nacional itself. Only the branches of U.S. banks survived. The 1921 disaster had been brought on by the fall in sugar prices on the U.S. market, and from the United States came a prompt credit of $50 million. On the heels of the credit came General Enoch Crowder who, under the pretext of controlling the use of the funds, became Cuba's de facto governor. Thanks to his good offices the Machado dictatorship came to power in 1924, but the Great Depression of the 1930s lay ahead for this bloody regime with Cuba paralyzed by a general strike. The U.S. crisis of 1929 could not but have a fierce impact on so dependent and vulnerable an economy as Cuba's: the price of sugar sank well below $.01 by 1932, and in three years the value of exports fell by 75 percent. At that time the unemployment index would have been hard to match in any other country.

  What happened to prices was repeated in volume of exports. The United States lowered import duties on Cuban sugar in exchange for similar privileges for U.S. exports to Cuba, but such "favors" only consolidated Cuba's dependence. By 1948 Cuba had recovered its quota to the point of supplying one-third of the U.S. sugar market, at prices lower than U.S. producers received but higher and more stable than those in the international market.

  Sugar production was arbitrarily limited by Washington's needs. The 1925

  level of some 5 million tons remained the average through the 1950s; dictator Fulgencio Batista took power in 1952 on the heels of the biggest harvest in Cuban history--over 7 million tons--with the mission of tightening the screws, and in the following year production, obedient to the demand in the north, fell to 4 million tons.( The director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's sugar program declared soon after the Revolution: "Since Cuba has left the scene, we cannot count on that country, the world's biggest exporter, which always had enough reserves to supply our market when need arose."7) When Batista fell in 1959, Cuba was selling almost all its sugar to the United States. As Marti said and
Che Guevara quoted at the OAS

  Punta del Este conference in 1961, "The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade 70

  in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country, and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one."

  THE CUBAN REVOLT AGAINST THE STRUCTURE OF

  IMPOTENCE

  Geographical proximity and the advent of beet sugar production in France and Germany during the Napoleonic wars made the United States the chief customer for Antillean sugar. By 1850 the United States was absorbing one-third of all Cuban trade, selling it more and buying more from it than Spain, whose colony it was; the Stars and Stripes fluttered from more than half the ships arriving at the island. A Spanish traveler found U.S.-made sewing machines in remote Cuban villages in 1859. The main streets of Havana were paved with New England granite.

  At the dawn of the twentieth century one could read in the Louisiana Planter. - "Little by little the whole island of Cuba is passing into the hands of U.S. citizens, which is the simplest and safest way to obtain annexation to the United States." There was already talk in the Senate of a new star in the flag; with Spain's defeat, General Leonard Wood governed the island. At the same time the Philippines and Puerto Rico dropped into the United States' lap.( Puerto Rico, another sugar factory, remained a prisoner. From the U.S. standpoint, Puerto Ricans are not good enough to live in a country of their own but are good enough to die in Vietnam for a country which is not theirs. In proportion to population, the "Free Associated State" of Puerto Rico has more soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia than the rest of the United States. Puerto Ricans resisting compulsory military service in Vietnam are sent to U.S. penitentiaries. Other humiliations inherited from the invasion of 1898 and blessed by law (the law of the U.S.

  Congress) are added to service in the U.S. armed forces. Puerto Rico is symbolically represented in the Congress, being without vote and virtually without voice. In exchange for this right: colonial status for an island that before the U.S. occupation had its own currency and carried on prosperous trade with the principal markets. Today the currency is the dollar and customs duties are fixed in Washington, where everything connected with the island's external and internal trade is decided. The same for foreign relations, transport, communications, wages, and work conditions. U.S, federal courts sit in judgment on Puerto Ricans; the local army is part of the U.S.

  army. Industry and commerce are in the hands of U.S. private interests. The emigration of Puerto Ricans has threatened to make denationalization complete: poverty has driven more than a million to New York hoping to improve their lot at the cost of losing their national identity.

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  There they form a subprolerariat which piles up in the most sordid slums.) "They have been conferred upon

  us by the war," said President McKinley, including Cuba in his remarks, "and with God's help and in the name of the progress of humanity and civilization, it is our duty to respond to this great trust." In 1902 Toma Estrada Palma had to renounce the U.S. citizenship he had acquired while living there in exile; the US. occupation forces made him the first president of Cuba. In 1960 the former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, told a Senate subcommittee: "Until Castro came to power, the United States had such an irresistible influence in Cuba that the U.S. ambassador was the country's second personage, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president."

  In 1954 a young revolutionary lawyer accurately prophesied, in his testimony to a court trying him for the attack on the Moncada barracks, that history would absolve him: "Cuba," he said in his resounding defense plea, "continues to be a producer of raw materials. We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows."8 Cuba bought not only automobiles, machinery, chemical products, paper, and clothing, but also rice and beans, garlic and onions, fats, meat, and cotton, all from the United States. Ice cream came from Miami, bread from Atlanta, and even luxury suppers from Paris. The country of sugar imported nearly half the fruit and vegetables it consumed, although only a third of its population had regular jobs and half of the sugar estate lands were idle acres where nothing was produced. Thirteen U.S. sugar producers owned more than 47 percent of the total area planted to cane and garnered some $180 million from each harvest. The subsoil wealth--nickel, iron, copper, manganese, chrome, tungsten--formed part of the United States' strategic reserves and were exploited in accordance with the varying priorities of U.S. defense and industry.

  In 1958 Cuba had more registered prostitutes than mine workers and a million and a half Cubans were wholly or partly unemployed.

  The country's economy moved in step with its sugar harvests. The purchasing power of Cuban exports between 1952 and 1956 was no greater than it had been thirty years earlier, although foreign currency was much more needed. In the 1930s, when the crisis deepened the economy's dependence instead of helping to break it, newly installed factories were actually dismantled to sell to other countries. When the Revolution triumphed on the first day of 1959, Cuba's industrial

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  development was poor and sluggish, over half the production was concentrated in Havana, and the few technologically modern factories were managed by remote control from the United States. A Cuban economist, Regino Boti, co-author of the Sierra guerrilleros' economic theses, cites the example of a Nestle's affiliate producing condensed milk in Bayamo: "When there was a breakdown, the technician simply phoned Connecticut and told them what he thought had gone wrong. He was told at once what to do about it and he simply followed instructions, without having to bother his head about theory. If this did not do the trick, a plane would arrive four hours later with a team of specialists. After nationalization, we could no longer phone for help, and the few technicians who might have been able to deal with minor faults had gone."9 This illustrates precisely what problems the Revolution faced when it embarked on the adventure of converting the colony into a fatherland.

  Cuba was crippled by its dependent status, and walking on its own feet has not been easy. Half of its children did not go to school in 1958, but, as Fidel Castro has said many times, the ignorance was much broader and more serious than mere illiteracy. The big campaign of 1961 mobilized an army of young volunteers to teach all Cubans to read and write, and the results astonished the world: according to UNESCO's Department of Education, Cuba now has the lowest percentage of illiterates and the highest percentage attending primary and secondary school in Latin America. But the inherited curse of ignorance cannot be overcome overnight--or in twelve years. A lack of efficient technicians, administrative incompetence and disorganization of production, and a bureaucratic fear of creative imagination and decision still obstruct the development of socialism. Yet despite the whole structure of impotence forged by four and one-half centuries of oppression, Cuba is being reborn with an enthusiasm that never flags: against obstacles it matches its strength, its gaiety, and its audacity,

  IN CUBA, SUGAR WAS THE KNIFE, IMPERIALISM THE

  ASSASSIN

  "Is building on sugar better than building on sand?" Jean-Paul Sartre asked himself when he was in Cuba in 1960.

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  On the pier in the port of Guayabal, which exports sugar in bulk, pelicans wheel over an enormous shed. Entering it, I am astonished to see a golden pyramid of sugar. As hatches open to run the unsacked cargo down into the ships below, more cascades of gold-sugar newly brought from the mills--pour in through openings in the roof. It glints and sparkles in beams of sunlight.

  This warm mountain, too big for my eyes to take in, is worth some $4 million.

  Here, I think to myself, is summed up all the euphoria and drama of the record harvest of 1970,

  A harvest which aspired--but despite superhuman effort, was not able--to reach 10 million tons. Yet the story behind the golden cascade is a much longer one. I think about the Francisco Sugar Company (in which Allen Dulles was a director), where I have pas
sed a week listening to stories of the past and seeing the birth of the future. . . . Josefina, daughter of Caridad Rodriguez, who studies in a classroom that was a barracks cell, the exact place where her father was held and tortured before he died; Antonio Bastidas, the seventy-year-old black who, early one morning this year, seized the lever of the siren with both hands, dancing in the air because the mill had overfilled its quota and yelling, "Shit, man, we done it!"--and no one would take Antonio's clenched hands off the lever while the siren, which had awakened the community, was awakening all Cuba. Stories of evictions, bribery, murder, hunger, of strange occupations which unemployment--obligatory more than six months of every year--

  engenders: hunting crickets in the fields, for example.

  But those who died did not do so in vain: Amancio Rodriguez, for one, riddled with bullets by strikebreakers at a meeting, had angrily refused a blank check from the boss; his comrades, when they went to get his body, found he owned no underwear or socks to be buried in. Or Pedro Plaza, arrested at age twenty, who guided a truckful of soldiers over mines he had himself laid and was blown up with the truck and the soldiers. And so many more, in this area and all over: "Here," an old sugar worker told me, "the people have a great love for martyrs--but only after they're dead. Before, there's nothing but complaints." It wasn't an accident, I think to myself, that Fidel Castro recruited three-quarters of his guerrilleros from among the campesinos, the sugar workers; nor that Oriente province has throughout Cuba's history been the biggest source of both sugar and rebellion. I understand the 74

  accumulated rancor that made the Revolution, after the big harvest of 1961, decide to take revenge on sugar, the living memory of humiliation. Was it also Cuba's fate? Did it then become a penitence? Could it now be a lever, a catapult for economic development?

  When a pardonable impatience set in, the Revolution destroyed many canefields and sought to diversify agriculture overnight. It didn't fall into the traditional error of dividing the latifundios into unproductive small farms, but every socialized farm proceeded to make sudden and excessive variations in its crops. Yet there had to be large-scale imports to industrialize the country, raise agricultural production, and satisfy many consumer needs which, in redistributing wealth, the Revolution enormously increased. Without big sugar harvests, where would the currency for these imports come from? The development of mining--particularly nickel--requires large investments, and these are being made; fishery production, also needing enormous investments, has risen eight times thanks to the growth of the fleet; ambitious plans for citrus fruit production are being implemented, but the interval of years between planting and harvesting demands patience. The Revolution, after discovering that it had confused the knife with the assassin, turned sugar, which had been responsible for underdevelopment, into an instrument of development. There was no alternative but to use the fruits of monoculture and dependence, born of Cuba's incorporation into the world market, to break the spine of that monoculture and dependence. No longer was the income earned by sugar to go to consolidate the structure of submission.( The stable sugar price guaranteed by the socialist countries has played a decisive role in this respect, as has the breaking of the U.S.-